Time for another quick round up of some recent releases that I’ve read but not yet told you about…
Shady Hollow by Juneau Black*
This is possibly the most unusual book I’ve read in a while. It’s a small town cozy mystery, except that the residents of the small town are woodland creatures. Or at least creatures that you would find in a north American woodland. Apart from that, there are the usual staples of cozy crime – a local reporter (who is a fox), a bookshop (owned by a raven), police officers (who are bears) and a murder victim (a toad). Think Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime series, but more cozy crime than comic crime. I’m still not quite sure how the differing scales of the animals works – is it more Animals of Farthingwood or Arthur the Aardvark? – or how the interspecies relationships work, but I read it and enjoyed it and would happily read the next one. This is the first in a series that was originally published in 2015 but is now being republished by Vintage – this came out last week and the next one is out in early March and the third (and final so far) follows in April.
The Missing Page by Cat Sebastian
This is the long awaited sequel to Hither Page and came out at the end of January. James is called back to the house where he spent his childhood summers for the reading of a will and discovers that he may not know the whole truth about what happened the last summer that he spent there. It is basically a country house murder mystery, except that the murder happened decades ago. Part Agatha Christie, part cozy crime, part romance, you get to spend more time with Leo and James and get to know them better Side note: the reading of a will is always such a great device for a murder mystery. Anyway, this will work better if you’ve read the first book – which is why it didn’t get a slot of its own, but it is delightful, so I wanted to talk about it!
Agent Zaiba Investigates: The Smugglers Secret by Annabelle Sami*
This is the fourth book about Zaiba and her group of friends who investigate crimes. It’s the first one that I’ve read, but I love a middle grade mystery series – and I would say this would work best for the younger end of the age group – it’s got illustrations and the language is simpler so it’s more of a first chapter book than say Robin Stevens‘ books – and there’s no murder which means it works for younger kids too. It’s fun, a little unlikely in patches – adults accepting eleven year olds helping investigate stuff – but no less unlikely than some other stories in the genre. I loved the sections with Zaiba’s aunt in Pakistan and all the food references made me really hungry! It’s out now in paperback, with the ebook following next month. These are going on my list of books to suggest for younger children – although I think all of the people I regularly purchase for are too old for this now sadly.
It was the 70th anniversary of the Queen’s accession on Sunday, so this week I thought I’d make recommendsday about books either about or featuring Elizabeth II. Some of these are a little tenuous… but that’s the way I role!
I’m going to start with Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader. In it, the Queen discovers the joys of reading after coming across a mobile library and borrowing a book to be polite. Soon she’s asking guests about their reading matter when they meet her and turning up late for events because she needed to read “just one more page”. It’s only a novella but it’s really very funny.
I haven’t actually read a lot of non-fiction actually about the Queen directly, although I have read various biographies of people whose lives have intersected hers. In fact the only one I could find on my reading lists is by Angela Kelly, who is the Queen’s dresser and I can’t really recommend it because I learned even less from it than is expected – and I didn’t expect much as she is still working for the Queen and the book was approved!
On a slightly surreal note, there’s a bit of Elizabeth in Darling Ma’am – which is a book about Princess Margaret that is described as “a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography” which is about right. In actual fiction, the young Princess Elizabeth makes brief appearances in various books in the Royal Spyness series, as well as in my beloved Gone with the Windsors. Elizabeth and her sister Margaret play larger roles in Princess Elizabeth’s Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal, but I had so many issues with that I nearly threw it at the wall – only the fact that I was reading it on the iPad stopped me!
Right, thats it – I’m off to try and work out which is the best of the actual biographies of Elizabeth II and dig out the Mountbatten book by the guy who wrote Traitor King for some more Elizabeth adjacent reading. And if anyone has read the new detective novel where the Queen is solving murders, let me know what it’s like in the comments – I keep seeing it but haven’t got around to taking a look yet!
I’m rechristening this post for 2022 – to quick reviews. What practical difference it makes I don’t know, but it feels like less pressure from where I am so I’m going with it! And there’s only three today, because frankly I’ve already written about so much of what I’ve read this month – which has been a particularly productive one on here.
Bookish and the Beast by Ashley Poston
This is the third book in the Once Upon a Con series, and although you’ll get most out of it if you have read the previous ones you don’t need to. This is a twist on Beauty and the Beast (as the title suggests) with a disgraced/out of favour young Hollywood actor exiled to a small town and a high school student who accidentally damages a book from the library of the house he is staying in. A pleasant YA way to wile away a few hours.
Rare Danger by Beverly Jenkins
A romantic suspense contemporary Novella from Beverly Jenkins. What is not to like. No seriously, what is there to complain about. Jasmine is a librarian who curates books for private libraries (I want this job) who ends up investigating the disappearance of a book dealer with a private security man – who she also happens to have he a meet cute with. It’s got romance it’s got peril and it’s very satisfying even if it is only just over 100 pages. This is great. I could have read pages more of it.
Capital Crimes ed by Martin Edwards
Honestly at this point it feels like it wouldn’t be a end of month round up without a British library crime classic. This one is a collection of London-set stories and actually features some creepier ones as well as a Margery Allingham Campion short and an Anthony Berkeley too. There’s also a story about a serial killer on the Underground, which was so realistic when it was first serialised, that passenger numbers dropped! Here the ending is a little truncated from that original serialisation, but you can still see why it would have freaked people out!
As I mentioned in yesterday’s BotW post, you may well come away from reading Vanderbilt wanting to know more about some of the people and situations in it. And I can help with that because this is not my first rodeo with this family or with American High Society in the Gilded age. So for today’s recommendsday, I’ve got a selection of books that tie-in in some way with some of the events or people that feature in Anderson Cooper’s book.
Lets start with the non-fiction, because that’s probably the short of the two lists. First of all is Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman and Paul Clarke Newell. I talked about this in my non-fiction Rich People problems post a couple of years ago. It’s the investigation into the life of a reclusive heiress, who wasn’t photographed for decades and who lived in a hospital for twenty years, despite owning mansions on both coasts of the US. Huguette Clark isn’t a Vanderbilt, but her family money was made at the same sort of time, she moved in the same circles and her family also had a penchant for building giant mansions. It’s mind boggling and she only died a couple of years back. Also mentioned in that 2019 post is The Unfinished Palazzo by Judith Mackerell, which features as one of its leading characters Peggy Guggenheim. Again, not a Vanderbilt, but another one of those big American families that you may well have heard of. Off the back of reading Vanderbilt, I’ve ordered myself Anne de Courcy’s The Husband Hunters, which is about the thirty year period where the British aristocracy looked across the pond to replenish their family coffers with American money by marrying American heiresses. I shall report back, but in the interim, may I suggest the tangentially related The Fishing Fleet, also by Anne de Courcy about the women sent out from Britain to India to try and snag a husband. Lastly, you can read Consuelo Vanderbilt’s own memoir – The Gitter and the Gold but I slogged through it last year, so you don’t have to. It’s a fascinating story, but she (and her ghost writer) aren’t the best at telling it and I definitely don’t suggest you read it first, because she doesn’t give you a lot of context about who the people are that she’s talking about, so you may well find yourself utterly lost or googling every few pages!
Let’s move on to fiction – and more particularly fictionalised real-lives, a corner of fiction that I really enjoy. In the later stages of the book, we see more of Anderson Cooper’s mother’s life. Gloria Vanderbilt was the subject of a notorious custody case when she was a child, but as an adult she was part of the group of women who Truman Capote called his Swans. I’ve read a couple of novels about this group – which probably means there are a stack more that I don’t know about. I read The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin back in 2016, before I knew much more about Truman Capote than you can get from the film Capote. And that fact made the reveal of how that little group blew up work really well although I was somewhat hazy about where the real life stuff ended and the fiction began! I read Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott a couple of years later – about the same group and the same events – and that was a BotW. In Swan Song you know what Truman has done quite early and you really see the consequences of his actions for the women concerned – you just need to stick with it beyond the initial few chapters which are a bit confounding until you figure out what is going on.
Downton Abbey prompted a surge of books set in the Gilded Age or featuring American heiresses, both in historical fiction and straight up historical romances. In the former category I’ve read My Last Duchess (known in the US as The American Heiress) by Daisy Godwin who is the writer behind the TV series Victoria. Cora Cash is American heiress whose marriage is going really quite badly and who is also having to navigate British High Society with very little help and a lot of people willing her to fail. I preferred The Fortune Hunter which she wrote a couple of years later and which is about Sisi, the Empress of Austria, but that doesn’t really fit this post does it? And then there’s Theresa Anne Fowler’s A Well-Behaved Woman, which is about Alva Vanderbilt and her quest to be queen of society. I found it tricky because everyone in it is really quite unlikeable – and it doesn’t have the humour that can make reading about horrible people fun, but I know that other people enjoyed it more than I did.
On the romance front, Eloisa James’s My American Duchess was one of the first to hit this trend – it came out in 2016 and I reviewed it for Novelicious back in the day. It’s got a heroine who has already jilted two fiancés and a hero who wants to marry a Proper English woman. You know where this is going, except that it’s more than just the fish-out-of-water, comedy of manners, forbidden love novel that you expect from the blurb. I haven’t reread it since, but at the time I said that it wouldn’t be a bad place to start if you want to dip your toe into the historical romance genre, and I would stand by that, because Eloisa James in this period was one of the most consistent of the romance genre. Joanna Shupe has written a couple of series set in Gilded Age New York, but my mileage with her varies a little – she tends towards more melodrama than I like and her characters tend to do abrupt about faces that annoyment. But I did quite like Baron, from the Knickerbocker Club series, which features a fake medium who needs to seduce a railroad millionaire in order to stop him from exposing her latest scheme and also Prince of Broadway from the Uptown Girls series which has a casino owner and the daughter of a family he is trying to ruin financially. More recently there’s Maya Rodale’s An Heiress to Remember (published in 2020) which sees an American heiress return to New York after her divorce to try and claim her family’s department store for herself. Only trouble is that it’s being run by the man whose heart she broke when she married a duke. It’s the third in a series – but I haven’t read the others, so I can’t speak to whether they work as well as this one did (for me at least).
And finally, there have also been a couple of murder mystery series set in and around the mansions that the Vanderbilts and their rivals built in Newport, Rhode Island. Of the ones that I’ve read, the best was Murder at Beachwood by Alyssa Maxwell, which is a historical mystery set in 1896 with a debutant heroine who is a fictional cousin of the Vanderbilts (an actual Vanderbilt connection! yay me!) who ends up trying to solve a murder after a baby is abandoned on her doorstep. It’s bit meladramatic – but that works with the time setting. It’s also the third in a series, and writing this has reminded me that I haven’t read the other two and I’m not sure enough of the Anderson Cooper book is set in Rhode Island for me to be able to use it for the state if I do the 50 states challenge again this year.
So there you are, a monster Recommendsday post with – hopefully – something for everyone. Happy reading!
As my top romance pick of the year was an Enemies to Lovers romance, I thought it was about time that I did a Recommendsday post about one of my absolutely favourite romance tropes! And honestly, it actually turned out to be quite difficult to find ones I haven’t already written about before – particularly contemporary ones because so many of them have already been Books of the Week!
My much-loved TV tie-in edition of Pride and Prejudice
Lets start off with something very obvious: Pride and Prejudice. This is the grandaddy of them all. If you’ve never read it, you should, but there are also stacks of retellings of it from pretty much every different twist you can think of. My favourite is probably still Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is set in modern day (well modern five years ago) Cincinnatti, which has a lot of the wit that makes Austen so much fun but which you don’t always get in the retellings.
Next up, The Viscount Who Loved Me – second I Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series and the basis for the upcoming next season on Netflix. Who knows how they’ll make it play out in the TV series (although the first one was quite faithful to The Duke and I) but in the book Kate is determined to save her older sister from marriage to reformed rake Anthony Bridgerton. Anthony has decided that he needs to marry (for reasons that you don’t really ever get to the bottom of in the book) but is determined not to marry for love (for reasons that you do discover). The two of them really don’t get on – until they do and it is delightful. Read it before the second series drops at the end of March.
I mentioned Regency Buck years ago in a post about comfort reads (and even longer ago in my post about Georgette Heyer), but it is one of my favourite historical romances with this trope. Judith and her brother come to London against the wishes of the guardian that they have never met. Of course they discover the Duke of Worth is the annoying man they met en route, the son of a man their father was friends with. Judith spends most of the book fighting against Worth’s every word and the reader isn’t really sure what he is up to until the reveal – which makes the resolution all the more satisfying. Side note: if anyone has come up with a modern (non problematic) twist on the guardian and ward trope, let me know in the comments!
Before I move on, I’ve featured a lot of Sarah MacLean books here before, and she does a great line in truly epic grovelling – which does often goes hand in hand with the enemies to lovers trope – like Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart, which is the last in her Love By Numbers series and has a deeply rule following hero who thinks the rule-breaker heroine is trying to trap him him to marriage. The Rogue Not Taken is also an enemies to lovers.
I have featured a lot of contemporary romances with this trope, to the point where it is hard to find stuff I haven’t already recommended! Basically all Lucy Parker’s books are enemies to lovers – but as well as Battle Royal being my favourite romance of last year, Headliners, The Austen Playbook and Pretty Face have been books of the week and Making Up got a mention in a summer reading post too. So that only leaves me with Act Like It that I haven’t already given a big old plug to. So here it is: it’s a fake relationship between two actors who can’t stand each other, to try and help a bad boy actor to rehab his image. It’s the first in the London Celebrities series, and when I read it I had a few issues with some of the British-isms not being right (Parker is from New Zealand) but even writing about it here has made me want to read it again!
If you want to go old school romance, then a couple of Susan Elizabeth Philips’ Chicago Stars books also have enemies to lovers going on. Nobody’s Baby But Mine is that rare thing – a pregnancy romance that I like. And that surprised me because the heroine deliberately sets out to get pregnant by the hero which is so far from my thing. But Jane is actually a very different character than you would expect from that description- she’s a scientist who thinks she’s making a rational decision about her life. Cal, our hero is the quarterback of the team and is (unsurprisingly) unhappy about Jane’s entire plan for his only involvement in their baby’s life to be conception. It’s funny and touching and very escapist. The first in the series, It Had To Be You, is also an enemies to lovers, with a heroine who inherits a football team and the team’s extremely Alphahole head coach. But that has rape in Phoebe’s backstory which I know is a no-no for some people.
Other contemporary romances that have been Books of the Week include: Talia Hibbert’s Act your Age Eve Brown , Ali Hazelwood’s Love Hypothesis, Christina Lauren’s Unhoneymooners (see also The Honey-Don’t List which was in a Mini review roundup), Jen De Luca’s Well Met, Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material, Alisha Rai Hate to Want You and Kate Claybourn’s Love at First. All of those are relatively recent releases (as in new or new ish when I wrote about them) but if you want something else a bit older, then how about Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me – which is now nearly 20 years old (!) – and features a first date that’s the result of a bet…
One last book before I go and that doesn’t really fit into any of the other categories – Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, which is the first of the trilogy set in the world at the centre of Cath’s fandom in Fangirl – and is the equivalent of Harry and Draco in Harry Potter books.
I promise we’re nearly at the end of the retrospective posts, but before I was finally done with 2021, I wanted to have a look at my Kindle Unlimited Membership last year and how it went. When I first tried KU, I wrote a whole post about it just before the end of my initial free trial period, and promised to check in every now and again and let you all know how it is going, and it’s been 18 months since that initial post and I haven’t. So consider this a check in.
Now obviously the first thing to say, is that I’m still a member and I’m still paying for it. I added the KU column to the monthly stats post last year, and if I’ve been tracking it right with my tags on Goodreads, I read 86 books via KU last year – which sounds like a lot. Now a reasonable number of those were short stories or novellas, mostly ones that are part of the various Amazon originals series. But where it’s been invaluable is supplying me with classic murder mysteries.
A selection of covers from BLCC books that were BotW picks
The British Library Crime Classics series rotates its titles in and out of KU as do the some of the publishers of George Bellairs and other of the other more forgotten of the Golden Age authors. This is how I’ve managed to work my way through so many Inspector Littlejohn books, but also sample new authors. And that has lead to BotW posts like The Christmas Card Crime, Murder in the Basement, The Secret of High Eldersham and Smallbone, Deceased as well as to entries in the Mini Review posts.
Then there’s the obvious help it gave me to complete my Read the USA challenge. When it came to panic stations to get it finished from November onwards, I was able to source a lot of the missing states using KU titles. Now that’s not to say that they were all good – in fact some of them I actively disliked – but the point was that I wasn’t paying money for them, aside from my KU subscription and otherwise, I would have been!
Some of the KU books that have made it into Mini Review posts
On the same front, it’s helped me sample a lot of new series – again, without spending any (extra) cash. I quite often get if you like x then try y recommendations that turn out to have books in KU. I run an Amazon wish list that’s just books that are in KU (or have previously been in KU that I’m hoping will come back around again) to help reduce decision fatigue – and also reduce the risk of impulse buying when my defenses are low!
So while I don’t think the membership is helping me reduce the physical to-read pile, I do think that I’m getting the value for the subscription. For me that is mostly coming from the ability to get the really good classic crime novels whenever I want them – so I don’t mind quite as much if some of the other stuff isn’t as good. Now I know the KU pot doesn’t work like that when it’s being distributed to authors, but there’s not a lot I can do about that, so it is what it is! But as it stands, I’m happy with the value I’m getting out of it, so it stays for a while longer at least.
It may be January 5th, but we still have the important matter of the December Mini reviews to deal with. Now quite a lot of the month was taken up with trying to finish the 50 states challenge for the year – the results of which can bee seen in this post from Sunday. However, in the quest to tick states off, sadly some of the books that I read in December were somewhat disappointing. And this leaves me with less than usual to talk about in my mini reviews. Which is sad, but considering how many posts I’ve written recently, I’m hoping you won’t feel short changed.
Board Stiff by Kendel Lynn
Elliot Lisbon works for a charitable foundation based on an island in South Carolina. Her usual jobs include keeping the peace between foundation members and smoothing over potential problems. In her spare time she’s working towards her PI licence – very slowly. Then the chair of the foundation’s board is accused of murder and her bosses as her to try and sort the situation out. Trouble is the new in town detective leading the investigation is her ex-boyfriend and he really doesn’t want her sticking her nose in. Trouble is if she doesn’t Elliot is likely to be out of a job. This one joins Double Whammy in the list of books that are trying to do similar things to the Stephanie Plum series (and I did read the last but one in the Plum series in December too and the less said about that the better). This has a few issues, but it rattles along at a nice pace and there’s plenty of potential here for the series. I have the next one cued up ready on the Kindle.
Oh. What. Fun by Chandler Baker
This is another Christmas-themed short story – I know, I know, I said that last week was the limit, but that was for Books of the Week. Or at least I’m allowed to bend the rules if I want to! Anyway, Tyler, Channing and Sammy have returned home for Christmas. Their mum Claire has always brought the holiday magic in their family – with traditions galore that she just loves doing for them all. Or does she. Maybe they should all have been paying more attention to her because this year is about to go very differently. This is a witty but thought provoking look at Christmas and the people who make it special and whether we should be appreciating them more – or if you are the Claire, whether you should be getting more help!
Dreaming Spies by Laurie R King
Yes, I know, another rule that I’m breaking – with a later book in a mystery series, where you really need to have read the earlier ones to make it all work at it’s best. But it’s been one of those months, so the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series makes another appearance on the blog. As with several times before in this series, the timeline is jumping about somewhat – it opens immediately after the events of Garment of Shadows (the previous book in the series) but a large section of this takes place between the events of The Game and Locked Rooms five books earlier. This fills in what happened when Mary and Sherlock were in Japan – events which have been hinted at before. And it’s a delicious mix of everything you have come to expect from the series – with lashings of early 20th century Japanese culture thrown in. I don’t know enough about the reality to be able to say how accurate it all is, but it certainly makes for a rather delightful reading experience. Do start at the beginning of the series though – with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. Just don’t think too hard about the age gap between Mary and Sherlock.
Release the Beast by Bimini Bon Boulash
Bimini was the breakout star of the second series of Drag Race UK – even if they didn’t win – and this is their debut book – all about their views on gender, class, capitalism, the patriarchy and more. If you enjoyed watching them on Drag Race, you’ll probably enjoy reading this too and getting more of a perspective on their life and their art. This the latest addition to my shelf of books about or by drag queens, and although I don’t like it as much as I like Legendary Children, it’s interesting and it’s a good way of throwing some coins the way of a Queen while the pandemic is making times hard for live gigs.
Yes, we’re not quite at the end of the year yet, but we’re close enough that I’m feeling fairly safe in posting this. Of course now I’ve written that, I’ll undoubtedly read something new and amazing in the last three days of the year to upset the apple cart. But hey, wouldn’t that be a delightful surprise. Anyway, these are my picks for the best new books that I read this year – they’ve all been Book of the Week Picks – so there’s plenty more detail about all of them in those posts if you click the links.
Non Fiction: Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
This was actually quite a tough decision because I’ve read a lot of really good non-fiction books this year. Empire of Pain was a Book of the Week back in July, and it has really stuck with me. In fact, I originally borrowed it from the library, but I ended up buying it on Kindle as well so that the other people who share my Kindle account could read it too. THis is the story of the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma – the company that invented OxyContin. I think it will be of interest to people who know very little about the US opioid epidemic as well as those who know a bit more to start with. It will probably make you quite cross though to say the least. If you want something that will make you less rage filled at lives lost or ruined, try one The Cult of We, about We Work, although the enormous amounts of money being thrown at so called unicorn-startups may also induce rage.
Mystery:Dial A for Aunties by Jessie Q Subanto*
I’ve read a lot of mysteries this year, but not many of them were newly published. But Dial A for Aunties was a real treat – a farcical comedy murder mystery with a wedding setting to counteract the dark undertones of the premise of the heroine accidentally killing her blind date. I liked the inter-auntie bickering as well as the romantic subplot. The sequel – featuring Meddy’s wedding is due out in 2022 and I’m already looking forward to reading it.
Romance: Battle Royal by Lucy Parker
This is another fabulous enemies to lovers romance from Lucy Parker to start her new series. It’s got a grumpy stuffy hero with a glittery, sunshine heroine. Both have darkness and sadness in their pasts (more details on that in the BotW post), but they work out that they are perfect for each other without any stupid misunderstandings or problems that can be solved with a conversation. Also you have to love a romance set on a baking show – see also Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake.
Other Fiction:The Guncle by Steven Rowley
Depressed and drifting since his big TV role ended, lapsed actor Patrick thinks that having to look after his niece and nephew for the summer is the worst idea ever. They’ve lost their mum, he’s lost his sister and having them around isn’t going to help him deal with it all. Except that it does. It’s also funny and snarky and camp. And the kids don’t fall into the super-irritating trap that so many book children do. Just a delight -even if it might give you the sniffles It’s still a nightmare to get hold of in the UK though – but since I wrote about it in July, it’s got onto NPR’s best books of the year list (as well as the Goodread awards list), so hopefully that situation will improve in 2022.
Bonus pick:Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light by Helen Ellis
I didn’t quite know where to put this, because I haven’t read a lot of essay collections this year – and I haven’t read a lot of memoirs either, but i couldn’t do a best books post of this year without mentioning it. Helen Ellis’s latest essay collection is full of hilarious characters and incidents and makes you want to be in her friendship group – as long as she’s not going to write about you of course. I had this preordered ahead of it’s release – and it was BotW here the week it came out because I read it straightaway. It’s easier to get hold of than The Guncle, but it is a bit pricey as it’s still only in hardback here. It’s worth it though.
Here’s to plenty of new books to talk about in 2022!
November was a really good month for books I want to talk about, but things were made easier on the picking front by the need to save the festive stuff for my Christmas reading post. So this round up is dominated by crime (and with a slight locked room, closed group twist) because that’s most of what else I was reading last month!
Weekend at Thrackley by Alan Melville
This isn’t a murder mystery exactly but it is another British library Crime Classic, and another featuring a closed group. Jim Henderson is invited to a weekend party at the house of a man he’s never met, but who claims to have been a friend of his father. On arrival he finds a strange assortment of guests – including one of his friends – a sinister Butler, and an attractive daughter of the house. Cue attempted robbery, a missing guest and much danger. It’s fast paced and you’re never quite sure what it’s going to do next. It’s in Kindle Unlimited too.
IQ by Joe
Isiah is a high school dropout who solves crimes. He charges what is clients can afford- whether it’s home cooked food or a lot, lot more. It is a modern take on Sherlock Holmes in some ways – but in tough LA neighbourhood. This first book in the series shows you him in action solving the mystery of who is trying to kill a big name rapper but also shows you his backstory and how he came to be doing what he is doing. I read most of this across the course of 24 hours because it’s really, really readable. Very readable indeed.
The Dublin Railway Murder by Thomas Morris*
This is a meticulously researched investigation into a real life locked room mystery in Dublin in 1856. It is undoubtedly very well researched, but oh boy is the author going to make sure we know about it. The start of the book, setting out the crime is actually quite pacey but it feels like it all gets a bit bogged down in the minutiae of the investigation. There are also so many people to keep track of and that doesn’t help. I think I was expecting a bit more of a conclusion at the end, but maybe that’s me being over optimistic about what can be achieved in a book about a 150 plus year old Murder. I picked it up because I enjoyed The Haunting of Alma Fielding, and was hoping for something similar – so a solid read, but not as good as say The Five.
Murder of a Martinet by E C R Lorac
I know I’ve already written about another Lorac book this month, but this one is also really good. A horrible matriarch is murdered in the house where all her family live. If it wasn’t for the indisposition of the old family doctor, it might have gone down as natural causes, but as soon as it doesn’t Inspector MacDonald is called in. He has to try and figure out what on Earth happened in a house seething with tensions and rivalries. I liked it a lot. And apologies for the picture quality on this – it’s the best I could do with the cover it had on Kindle Unlimited…
The Ex Hex by Erin Stirling
I’m just throwing in one romance quickly to finish! When Rhys Penhallow returns to a Graves Glen to recharge the town’s ley lines, he thinks the worst that can happen will be running into the woman whose heart he broke (unwillingly) nine years earlier. But it turns out Vivienne nursed her broken heart with tears… and a curse. Now the two of them will have to work together to fix the problems they’ve caused with the town’s magical energy. This is much less dramatic than I was expecting but was a nice sweet second chance-y romance with witches. I’m too late for Halloween but it’s still worth a look.
Here we go again – another selection of books I have read and want to talk about or recommend. This month it is a particularly varied selection – with literature in translation, history, historical crime and short stories and essays about relationships. Something for everyone really.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Cafe*
There always seems to be a busy Japanese novel around and Before the Coffee Gets Cold was The One a couple of years back. The follow up came out last year and of course I’m super behind with things as always and then read them both back to back. You need to read them in order though as they tell a series of stories about a cafe where you can travel back in time, if you are sat in the right seat and only for the duration of time a cup of coffee is warm for. Across the two novels you meet a range of people who wish to make the journey, but also learn about the people who work at the cafe. I had to stop reading it on the train because it made me cry, but they were both absolutely wonderful. I recommend.
Stealing the Crown by T P Fielden
T P Fielden is the author of the Miss Dimont mysteries, that I’ve written about here before, but the author is also a biographer and royal commentator and this uses his knowledge about the royals during the Second World War as part of a murder mystery that sees a painter who has ended up with a job at Buckingham Palace investigating the death of another staff member. It’s a pacey and enjoyable read and in one of those serendipitous moments you some times find, mentioned Camp Siegfried in it, just a couple of weeks after I’d been to see a play set at the camp – which was for American-German Nazis (or at least nazi sympathisers). There’s a second book in the series which I will keep an eye out for.
Index, History of the by Dennis Duncan*
So, this sort of does what it says on the tin: it’s a history of the humble index. They’re in every reference book, but if you’re my age or younger, you’ve had the safety net of the computer search since you were old enough to be starting on serious research. But before Google and before the computer library catalogue, the index was the key to research and learning. Dennis Duncan’s book examines how the index came into being, how it has evolved through history and how it’s use has evolved too. I’m not sure I’d ever given much thought to how indexes started, or even what people did about an index before the printing press, but now I know all the answers! And it’s fascinating to see that the same sort of arguments that are made about computer search diminishing people’s knowledge were made about the index when it first appeared – if you don’t have to read the whole book, how can you possibly be getting the full benefit of the book? This would make a great gift for the book worm or history fan in your life this Christmas as well.
The One series from Amazon
I read the kindle versions of this collection rather than the audio versions, but I really quite enjoyed the range of stories within The One. From Jacqueline Woodson writing about how she found her partner, through a dog with more than one family, how a young widow deals with bereavement to a friendship that moves in cycles of closeness and separation, the stories take on the different paths people can take to find The One in their lives. They’re bite sized but often thought provoking and were perfect for those moments when I wanted to read something but didn’t have the time or concentration to commit to a full length book. And they are free if you’re in Kindle Unlimited. What is not to like.
This is Your Time by Ruby Bridges
This was one of my impulse purchases on during my weekend in London in the middle of the month. I studied the desegregation of US schools as part of my history GCSE and it sort of boggles my mind that 14 year old me didn’t twig that the students involved were my parents age. It is that recently that a little girl needed an escort from the national guard to attend a school – and that her father lost his job because of the fact that his daughter was desegregating the city’s schools. This is aimed at middle grade students and sees Ruby Bridges explaining what she did and what the response was and how she sees that fitting in to civil rights protests in America today. This would make a valuable resource for primary school libraries and educators.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
