Kate Clayborn has consistently written some of my favourite books of any year that she has published a book, so it would be remiss of me not to mention that she has a new book out this week. It’s called The Paris Match and it’s about a woman who heads to Paris for her former sister-in-law’s wedding, where she accidentally gives the bride cold feet and ends up butting heads with the best man who wants her to fix it. I love the sound of this, and I love a book set in Paris. I had this pre-ordered in paperback (as you can maybe tell because of the photo!) and I’m planning on making this my post Easter reading treat. In the meantime, you can read my posts about The Other Side of Disappearing, Georgie, All Along, Love Lettering and the Chance of a Lifetime series.
The stats are coming up tomorrow as a Good Friday treat for you all, but before we get to that given that I’m on a run of cozy fantasy books I wanted to mention this one, which came out on Tuesday and which I’m already reading (but haven’t finished yet so this isn’t a review!). This is an alternative history type historical fantasy in a world where magic is real and Mary Anning (who was a real life fossil collector and palentologist) is a struggling fossil dealer who wants to be accepted into the Geomagical Society of London but is stymied by her gender and her lack of formal higher education. But one day she is out fossil hunting after a landslide when a pterodactyl egg hatches in her hand. Ajax could be the thing that makes her career – but the emissary from the society is her former fiancé and soon she is stuck between rival factions of the society with their own agendas. This is blurbed by Heather Fawcett (as in Emily Wilde and Agnes Aubert) which is why I requested it – so far (just over a third in) it’s a bit less cozy and has more religion than I was expecting, but I’m interested to see where it goes and how it all gets resolved.
I’ve written a lot about Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse before, but it’s been two whole years since I last wrote a post about it, so I think it’s only fair to do this week’s new book post about the omnibus edition of the Soulless manga, which came out on Tuesday. This is exciting because the individual editions which you can see in my picture are out of print and have been for a while (I’m very glad I splurged on them back in the day) and so it means that (hopefully) it will get a bit of a new life with the omnibus.
The manga covers the first three books in the story of Alexia Tarabotti, namely Soulless, Blameless and Changeless. I would tell you where that takes you to in her story, but that would be a spoiler so all I will say is that there are two more books – Heartless* and Timeless – after this, which haven’t been turned into manga (and won’t be) but it does work as a trilogy. I’m a graphic novel reader rather than a manga one, but I really did enjoy these and I’m glad to have them on my shelf. I will also be telling the comic book store to make sure they get a copy of the omnibus because I think there will be a customer or two who would like it.
*I’m still angry that my Heartless is a different size to the rest of the series, and if I ever see a copy that is the same size as the others I will be buying it so I can shelve them in order by chronology not by size because you can see from my photo what an absolute mess it is.
A bit left field for this week’s new book because Alan Bennett is a legend. This officially comes out today, but the copy I pre-ordered for my little sister arrived on Tuesday. So you may already have your copy too. Enough Said is the fourth volume of Bennett’s diaries, taking you from 2016 – 2024 when Alan turned 90. He will be 92 in May and so every new thing at this point is a blessing and a treat. A Question of Attribution was on TV over Christmas, and I’m waiting for The Choral to pop up on a streaming service so I can catch up on that too.
Honestly I’m torn between excitement and fear for this one. Kids Wait Until You Hear This was one of the books I mentioned in my anticipated books post, and as I said in that her discipline in maintaining her public persona is iron clad – as you could see in the authorised documentary about her last year – that I’m dubious about whether there will be anything new here but if there is it will be fascinating. I’ve also been a little bit worried about the AI dance track that she contributed vocals to along with the uptick in content she’s been featuring in on her socials given how frail she looked on Drag Race and in her appearance at the Oscars a few years back, but hey, hopefully all of it is her choices. I have my copy pre-ordered anyway…
After a three year break, there is a new Perveen Mistry mystery out this week. These are murder mysteries set in 1920s India and our heroine/detective is Perveen, who happens to be Bombay’s only female solicitor. This new book is called The Star from Calcutta and sees her securing her biggest client yet – a Bollywood studio. She’s meant to be helping an actress who owns the studio with her director husband, who is caught up in a breach of contract dispute, but a body is found after a screening and the actress goes missing. I’ve read the first two in this series and really like Perveen as a character and the whole setting and set up and as you know I love a 1920s-set mystery. I have the third one waiting to be read, and as you know I try to read things in order so it may be a while before I get to this one, but if anything was going to tempt me to get going on the series it’s the prospect of a Bollywood-set book because I love a Hollywood-set book, particularly in the early years of the movie industry so this is right up my street.
The latest Library Lovers book, Booking for Trouble, came out in hardback in the US on Tuesday, This is the sixteenth in Jenn McKinlay’s series about Lindsay Norris, a library director in Briar Creek, Connecticut, and sees Lindsay getting involved in a murder after heading out on a book boat to some of the islands in her library’s patch, inspired by bookmobiles (or mobile libraries as we have here I guess?) that she’s seen in other areas.
But this also is my chance to talk about the demise of the mass market paperback in the US. These aren’t available on Kindle in the UK, so I’ve been buying in the paperbacks for years from the US. There are a couple of series like this, where I rely on these smaller than average (and cheaper than average!) paperback copies to get my fix. But sales have been dropping, and more and more books have switched to the larger and more expensive trade paperback format. Various people have been writing about it, but here’s the New York Time’s article from the start of the month, and Publisher’s Weekly’s from December. As a voracious and speedy reader, the price point and convenience of mass markets – especially secondhand – has been a boon for my reading – particularly in my early days of romance reading when the likes of Eloisa James and Sarah MacLean weren’t always getting UK releases. There are series that I want to finish – or continue reading – where I definitely can’t justify the hardback price for them. And given my love of matching sets, a size change is definitely not what I want either! This is one of a number of series where I’m going to have decisions to make as the next books come out.
With the skating over and the Winter Olympics coming to a close, I’m keeping the winter sport tangent going on for ever so slightly longer with a trilogy of romance novels set around a ski resort. Slightly tenuous, but I’m going with it and you can’t stop me!
This three novels are interconnected but not really interdependent (the last one is the question mark) romances set in the ski resort of Bluebird Basin. Come As You Are which was a BotW in 2023 and was about Madison the ex-rockstar and sober living home owner and Ashley who is fighting to keep control of her family’s ski hill. She’s in her mid 40s, he’s around a decade older and they both have baggage to overcome before they can get to their happily ever after. The second book is Lips Like Sugar which is about Mad’s bandmate Cole and Ashley’s best friend Mira who end up fake dating at Ashley and Madigan’s wedding because of Mira’s awful ex. But the fake date is the start of a real connection between the two of them even after Cole has headed back to Seattle.
And finally Wish You Were is the only one I haven’t written about here beforeand is the story of Kevin and Davis, who were a couple until Kevin relapsed into drug addiction. He’s back from rehab and wants to win Davis back, but she really doesn’t know if she can trust Kev again. And the resort is so small they can’t exactly never see each other. There are themes of addiction and recovery running through the first two stories but this one has addiction and recovery much more front and centre than those two did, which is a bit less in my regular reading wheelhouse. Like the others in the series this is a second chance romance, but this time the protagonists are a lot younger, and they are looking for their second chance after Kev’s relapse into drug addiction. It’s still really well written, and it’s really emotional and builds to a satisfying resolution but I think it was a bit too high on the angst scale for me at the time that I was reading it (and to be fair, I don’t think I’ve got any more emotionally resilient since, if anything the opposite). But if you do like that, I think it’s really going to work for you. But the first two with the older protagonists were much more my thing – they’re not quite the same as the Cathy Yardley older protagonist romances that I’ve loved, but they’re not too-too far away from that.
These are all in Kindle Unlimited at the moment- along with Jess K Hardy’s two space-set romances, which I haven’t read (yet).
I’ve got one for the historical romance fans this week, while you wait for the second half of the latest series of Bridgerton to arrive next week! This is a paperback release of the first two books in Alexandra Vasti’s Halifax Hellions series – In Which Margo Halifax Earns Her Shocking Reputation and In Which Matilda Halifax Learns the Value of Restraint – rather than something new-new, so serious fans may have read already. I have Vasti on my to-read-once-the-pile-goes-down list because so many people in the romance communities that I hang out in are huge fans of her books, and she’s also a really interesting interview, which is usually a good sign too. This is out in Kindle next week, but in the meantime Ladies in Hating, which came out in September is on offer on Kindle for 99p!
The NFL season may be over and the Seahwawks have taken the Vince Lombardi trophy back to Seattle, but this week we have a new addition to Susan Elizabeth Philips’s Chicago Stars series. I’ve written about these before – the last one actually came out the week following the Super Bowl too, but they remain one of my favourite sports romance series (maybe my actual favourite?) despite the huge swaths of NFL and NHL romances that are on the shelves at the moment. The new book is called And the Crowd Went Wild, and it has a star quarterback and an actress as the duo – now I could get cynical about this (yes Taylor is a pop star and Travis is a tight end, not a QB) except that it’s Susan Elizabeth Philips and this is what she does but also I just heard Julia Quinn recommend it on last week’s Smart Bitches Trashy Books podcast. I’m really looking forward to reading this when I get hold of it.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 