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, detective, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: Underscore

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For this week’s pick I’m reporting back in with some good news: the new Vinyl Detective is pretty good.

The set up is this: the granddaughter of an Italian film music composer is trying to reissue his music. But because he was suspected of carrying out a murder, some of his masters were destroyed and records themselves are somewhat hard to find. So she enlists the Vinyl Detective to try and track down the rarest of them all for her – the one for the movie where the murder happened. Oh and if he can clear her grandfathers name that would be great. But trying to stop her are the grandchildren of the murder victim…

You may remember that I was a little trepidatious about this one, because I didn’t love the last book in the series. But this was a really good read. It’s got a good mystery, a real sense of the musical genre it’s tackling and lots of food. Plus the extended gang is very much in evidence if you have read the other books in the series. Plus as a bonus for me, there’s lots of action in and around Barnes and Richmond, which are both places that I have stayed in a fair bit in my efforts to avoid the long commute back and forth to London at various points.

I’m going to say this will work best if you’ve read at least some of the others in the series, but it’s also an excuse to post the shot of them all here and to comment on the fact that this book’s cover animal is a dog. You’re welcome. I’ve already seen this in the shops so in should be relatively easy to get hold of in paperback as well as in all the usual digital formats.

Happy Reading

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: May 5 – May 11

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So here’s the thing, despite the fact that I have a tonne of books waiting to be read, at the start of last week all my brain wanted to do was re-read Mitchell and Markby books. Now this started because I bought the first one second hand a few weeks back as you know, and started reading it on Sunday night. And then I ended up buying the next few on kindle so I could read on because when I read them originally I had borrowed them from a friend and I gave them back like the good girl I am. And then I really struggled to get started on anything new to me and so moved on to more familiar old friends – with new books in series that I like and a dash of Terry Pratchett. We will see where this week takes us…

Read:

Say it With Poison by Ann Granger

A Season for Murder by Ann Granger

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

Cold in the Earth by Ann Granger

Murder Among Us by Ann Granger

Underscore by Andrew Cartmel

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Started:

A Farewell to Yarns by Jill Churchill

The Beast of Littleton Woods by T E Kinsey

Still reading:

Curtain Call to Murder by Julian Clary

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

Wish You Were Here by Jess K Hardy*

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson

Cher: The Memoir Part One by Cher

Four books bought and one pre-order made. And of course another preorder arrived.

Bonus picture: we have a flower on the new(ish) arrival!

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

concerts, not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Typsy

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Back at the theatre this week – this time for a one man show. And if you want to see it you’ll have to be fast because it’s a one week run and it ends tonight. Also, it was mostly sold out, so you could be out of luck anyway. But still, here I am, being timely.

Typsy is Trevor Ashley’s latest cabaret show where he’s playing Liza Minnelli – and also Judy Garland, sometimes in the same song. This isn’t limited to songs that you think of as being performed by Liza, it expands out to other musical theatre standards. There are witty lyric changes, chat at the audience between them and plenty of jokes. And I really liked that it’s not just relying on all the old Liza cliches – it’s referencing the newer stuff too – from the documentary, to the appearance on Drag Race to Michael Feinstein. It’s also got a wonderful seven piece band – including what may be the hardest working winds player I have recently seen – swapping between clarinet, two saxophones, flute and piccolo at a rate of knots.

Ashley was recently at the Menier playing Roger de Bris in their wonderful production of The Producers, and is transferring with the cast to the West End for the run this autumn (yes, I’m going again), but that was the first time I had seen him in anything. He’s an Australian and has a string of musical theatre an cabaret credits down there – and that experience really showed in this. I saw it on the first night of the one week run and it felt like he really knew what he was doing and what the plan was. There were a couple of rough edges, but they only made it feel spontaneous and unrehearsed. And the Menier is a really nice space for a show like this – intimate enough that you feel close to the action, but big enough that there’s space for a good sized band and still for a bit of dancing.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this pop up again somewhere in London – it sold very quickly when it was announced, and Liza-related shows are always popular especially when they’re done well. And this is done well.

Typsy is at the Menier Chocolate Factory until tonight, The Producers is at the Garrick Theatre from September. You can find out more about Trevor Ashley on his website

The pile

Books Incoming: Early May edition

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This month’s Books Incoming comes slightly earlier than mid-month, but that’s because the arrival pile was getting a bit teetering and I wanted to sort it out. And some of these have already been read so they can go straight from the pile to the proper shelves, without adding to the pending pile(s).

Lets start with the ones I’ve already read, so that’s Death at the Playhouses which is the sequel to Death at the Dress Rehearsal, then there is A Case of Mice and Murder and The Witching Hour aka the most recent book in the Dandy Gilver series. Then we have a couple more in series that I read: the latest in Ann Granger’s Campbell and Carter series which came out in paperback this week and which I had preordered, likewise the eighth Vinyl Detective, then there are two Follet Valley books, one of Elly Griffiths’ Brighton series, another of the Edmund Crispins as I try and tick that series off, another in the Writers Apprentice series, and the next book in a historical mystery series that I had somewhat forgotten about.

And on the non-series front, there’s Beyond Belief which is non fiction about the Pentecostal church and which I bought after seeing the author pop up as a talking head on a documentary the other week and my two purchases from Market Harborough the other week – A Conflict of Interest which was the purchase in Quinns and the Rosemary Shrager which was the Oxfam bookshop one. That’s the lot, and it’s still too many – the pile next to the tbr shelf is teetering, so I really need to do something about it. And yet I keep getting distracted by re-reads and the NetGalley list. What can I say – I’m a law unto myself!

Have a great weekend everyone.

bingeable series, fiction, Series I love

Series Redux: Cazalet Chronicles

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We’ve had events marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day this week, and so I thought I would mention one of my favourite series that’s set at least partially during the Second World War today – and that’s Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet series. I wrote a full post about the books back in 2020 and you can read that here.

The end of the war comes during the third book and as I love the children’s stories (or at least they were children at the start) the third and the fourth books are my favourites of the series in many ways. Here’s a bit from Archie and Clary’s VE Day celebrations

Showers of golden stars from rockets occurred in the crocus-mauve sky and the Palace was floodlit, and round the statue of Queen Victoria an enormous snake of people were dancing the hokey-cokey, singing and stamping their feet, and beyond, near the railings, people were chanting, shouting for the King. There were thousands of them, so many indeed and sometimes so tightly packed that they had held hands all evening in order not to get parted, and sometimes they had to shout to each other to be heard, but sometimes they simply sang whatever everyone else round them was singing: ’Land of Hope and Glory’, ’God Save the King’ and bits of the hokey-cokey.

Confusion by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Anyway, I love them, they’re wonderful and if you haven’t read them, you should. They always seem to be in print and I own them in paperback, ebook and also some on audio. That should give a sense of how dear to me they are. And as they’re not short, if you like them you have about 2,000 pages of them to enjoy.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone.

Book previews

Out this week: New Rachel Lynn Solomon

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For this week’s new release it wanted to mention the new novel by Rachel Lynn Soloman. Her last book Business or Pleasure was a book of the week, but she can be a bit hit or miss for me or at least the books can sometimes not quite live up to the promise of the blurb. The blurb for What Happens in Amsterdam promises a second chance romance with a heroine who moves from California to Amsterdam after being dumped only to run into her first love, a Dutch exchange student who mysteriously ghosted her a decade earlier. I love a second chance romance – just as long as the reasons for the first time going wrong aren’t too, too awful – so I’m hopeful about this one.

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: April Quick Reviews

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It’s a murder mystery special for this month’s Quick Reviews. I didn’t mean it to turn out that way, but it just did and maybe given how many mystery books I’m reading at the moment that shouldn’t be a surprise! Anyway, here are three books (one of which I’ll admit I finished in May although I started it in April) that I read last month that I haven’t already told you about.

Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective by Kelly Gardiner and Sharmini Kumar*

This is a murder mystery set two years after the end of Pride and Prejudice, where Caroline Bingley gets drawn into investigating a murder after Georgiana Darcy’s maid goes missing. Soon the two women are in London investigating where they find a body and then come up against magistrates, distinctly unsavoury people and the East India Company to try and find out what happened. I thought the murder mystery in this was good – I particularly liked the way the East India Company and their activities were used in it – but I wasn’t convinced about the Pride and Prejudice side of things. There’s lots of P&P related spin-offs out there – I’ve read a load of them myself – but I’m not sure this delivered either of the things that people come to them for – which is Austen-like wit and writing or more of the characters you loved from the book. I think this would have been as good a mystery and maybe even a better book – if it wasn’t hung off Austen’s characters.

Murder on Line One by Jeremy Vine*

Edward Temmis has just lost his job presenting on at a local radio station. He’s still recovering from a tragedy in his personal life and this leaves him somewhat adrift. Then the granddaughter of one of his former listeners asks for his help investigate the death of her grandmother. But as they investigate, he discovers that more than one of his listeners may have been targeted. This is the first murder mystery from radio and TV presenter Jeremy Vine. And given that I used to work in a local radio station this was totally intriguing to me. But perhaps the fact that I used to work in local radio was the reason that I didn’t quite click with this – because this is the best staffed commercial radio station that I’ve ever come across (and yet with no mention of sales staff!) and it just kept lifting me out of the story and making it harder to get lost in the story. Add to that I found quite a lot of the characters quite hard to like and that I had the culprit figured out pretty early on and it just didn’t work for me as well as I had hoped. But that’s fine and it may well work better for other people who don’t have the background that I do – or who don’t read as many murder mysteries as I do!

Murder will Out by Alison Joseph

I mentioned in the Recommendsday a couple of weeks ago that I thought there was an Agatha Christie-solves-crimes series, so as I managed to find one of them and read it and I thought I ought to report back! This is set in 1923, during Agatha Christie’s first marriage to Archie. She’s busy writing her next novel when there’s an actual murder in the village that she lives in and her neighbour is determined that Agatha is the perfect person to help solve it (and exonerate the neighbour’s godson). This is a bit too long to be a novella, but it’s not really proper novel length either. I think it’s probably got too much plot for the length that it actually is – but it’s quite hard to find the balance of enough plot to keep the reader guessing but not so much that it’s confusing for the reader. And a bit like the Caroline Bingley novel above, I’m not sure why it needed to be hung off Agatha Christie, because it didn’t feel that specific to Christie as a character – it could have been a fictional mystery writer getting dragged into a local murder.

And that’s your lot this month – a quick reminder that as well as the Real People Detective fiction Recommendsday, I also gave you some Conclave-y recommendations and some Unhappy Marriage fiction. The Books of the Week were Legends and Lattes, A Case of Mice and Murder, The Edinburgh Murders and The Rest of Our Lives.

Book of the Week, detective, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Tea on Sunday

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Happy Tuesday everyone. I’m deeply confused about what day of the week it is and messing with my brain as I keep panicking that I’m forgetting to do things/should be somewhere that I’m not. Why is my brain like this? Anyway – to this week’s pick which sees me back with a British Library Crime Classic.

In Tea on Sunday, Alberta Mansbridge has invited an assortment of guests over for tea – among them her nephew, a friend she had fallen out with, her accountant, her doctor, an ex-prisoner she has been trying to rehabilitate and an Italian architect she has been sponsoring. But when they arrive they find that she has been murdered. The house is locked, and so her murderer must have been someone who she would have let into the flat. Our detective charged with working out who is responsible is Inspector Corby who discovers that there are plenty of options for who might have wanted the wealthy, elderly lady out of the way.

This written in 1973 but feels like it’s from an earlier period – except for the fact that some of the guests are of decidedly more modern occupations than you would have found in some of those books, or at least more explicit about what it is they do than you would have found in many of those mysteries. There have been a few patchy novels among my recent BLCC reading – but this is definitely a good one. Lettice Cooper was a prolific author, but not normally of mystery novels but I really liked her writing style so I shall look out for more from her. One of her other novels has been published by Persephone so that may be the easiest one for me to lay my hands on, should I ever get the current state of the pile under control.

Anyway, this is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and I’ve seen it in paperback in the shops too as it’s a recent release.

Happy reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: April 28- May 4

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It’s a Bank Holiday in the UK today so if you have a day off work, I hope you’re enjoying it and sorry that the nice weather didn’t last. It’s also May, which means hopefully the nice weather will come back at some point, although we’re all bound to spend the next month getting our outfits wrong as we try and predict whether we need to be dressing for heat or cold. Anyway, continued progress on some fronts on the reading, and less so on others as there’s been a lot going on in real life. But I seem to be saying that a lot at the moment, so maybe this is just normal now? What a worrying thought.

Read:

Death on the Pier by Jamie West

The 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie

Death at the Matinee by Jamie West

Murder on Line One by Jeremy Vine*

Tea on Sunday by Lettice Cooper

Death at the Playhouses by Stuart Douglas

Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer

Started:

Curtain Call to Murder by Julian Clary

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

Still reading:

Wish You Were Here by Jess K Hardy*

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson

Cher: The Memoir Part One by Cher

Two books bought – one in Quinns, one in Oxfam.

Bonus picture: the narrow alley down to Quinns bookshop – which I always expect to be higher up the hill than it is…

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

Exhibitions, not a book

Not a Book: Culture Shift

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We had a lovely day out in London yesterday – with a nice meal and a show but also an unplanned trip to the National Portrait Gallery where we went to their exhibition The Face Magazine: Culture Shift. And I’ve rushed this to the top of the Sunday post list because it’s only got two weeks to go before it closes.

So if you haven’t come across The Face before, it is a culture, fashion and style magazine that was originally from 1980 to 2004 and was revived and relaunched in 2019. I only remember the 1990s onwards era – and even then it’s somewhat hazily because I was a mainstream pop girl, and The Face was very much cooler than I was. But its influence on contemporary culture was huge.

In the 1980s it was the first publication that really covered the Blitz Kids and the club culture that became the New Romantic movement. It wrote about the clubs, the people at the clubs and the fashion that they wore, and then it photographed the bands that came out of it. In the early years the photographers were mainly young and scrappy, often self-taught and just doing what they wanted to without referring to the history or grammar of photography. And so their photos looked different – and they changed what was out there. And then in the 90s they were all about the indie and Britpop groups and they are basically responsible for the career of Kate Moss – she was the face of The Face – as well as launching the careers of tonnes of models and photographers.

This has got a whole load of amazing images along with their backstories and shows why and how the magazine was a disruptor and how it influenced the photography and graphic design of today. If you weren’t around or there it’s hard sometimes to appreciate how different what they were doing was -and if there is a weakness of the exhibition it’s that there are no equivalent images from other magazines to compare The Face’s stuff to because what they were doing then can seem so mainstream for what we see today. But it really wasn’t.

If you get a chance to go and see it before it closes, it is pricey (but what exhibitions aren’t though) but for me it was worth it.