Category: books

I’m finally up to day with Ann Granger’s “other” contemporary mystery series, so the time is right for a Friday series post about them.

Jess Campbell is a detective inspector, who we first met in the Mitchell and Markby series, but who has now moved to Gloucestershire. In the first book Ian Carter is her new superintendent and they start their working relationship by investigating a murder mystery, and the murders keep coming as we’re due an eight book in the series just before Christmas.

They are definitely towards the cozier end of mystery novels with police officers as the leads and are rural-based in the main, set in villages and rural locations with interesting casts of characters. If you like Mitchell and Markby, these have all the same sort of vibes and feels, just with different lead characters (who are both cops this time) and a different location. They’re incredibly easy to read and once I’d got my hands on copies of the ones I was missing, it was hard not to just read them back to back. I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens in book eight – I started in the middle of the series then jumped back to the start and read the ones that I hadn’t read in order – so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next and what happens with Jess and Ian. I#

I’ve got hold of these from larger book stores with big crime sections – like Waterstones Gower Street and Foyles, but they’re also in Kindle and Kobo and are often pretty reasonably priced.

Have a great weekend everyone.

I did a series post for Ashley Herring Blake’s Bright Falls series a few weeks back, and if you liked those – you might also be interested to know that there is a new Alexandria Bellefleur novel out this week. Truly Madly Deeply came out on the 30th and the blurb tells me it has a bestselling romance novellist who has just found out her fiancee is cheating – just after she signed up to present a podcast giving relationship advice. But when she meets her co-host, who is a cynical divorce lawyer she walks out. But Colin (that’s the lawyer) tracks her down and asks for a second chance and as they get to know each other they go from enemies to friends and then maybe more…

I’m been taking a bit of a break from enemies to lovers romances, but the description of this does interest me, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

It’s May Day, so here I am with another batch of short reviews of other things I read last month that I haven’t already told you about – or in one case, updating you on something I mentioned on release day.

Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley

A lot has been written about Agatha Christie’s disappearance in 1926 – in non-fiction as well as fiction – and while that is one of the key moments in her life, this sets it in the context of her childhood, her marriage and her work as an author. If all you know about Christie is that she wrote mysteries and that she disappeared, this will fill in all the rest of the gaps for you and is very readable as you do it. It’s clearly got a lot of research behind it, but it wears it very lightly. Definitely worth a read if you’re a classic mystery reader.

Vanishing Point by Patricia Wentworth

I’ve read a few of Patricia Wentworth mystery novels now, both in the Miss Silver series and outside it, and although they’re not my favourite of the “other” Golden Age crime novels, they’re still pretty consistently good, more towards the thriller side of the scale than some of the others, but still with a body or two. They tend to have a slightly higher proportion of Plucky Young Women of various types, but there is variation within that as well. I picked this one up from a charity book exchange, but they’re also relatively regularly available at a good price on Kindle.

The Breakup Tour by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka

I mentioned this when it came out so it’s only fair that I come back with a bit of a verdict on it – and it’s bad news considering how much I enjoyed The Roughest Draft last year. Sadly this is a disappointment and a puzzle. This is slightly spoiler-y but I can’t explain without them: A puzzle because I don’t know who this is actually for. I don’t think the Taylor fans will like it because the Taylor stand in is just terrible and plays all into all the worse of the tropes about her life. I don’t think the non-Taylor fans will either because as a reader you just can’t see how they can be happy and be true to themselves. It feels like it has all the elements of a toxic relationship where it will just keep repeating in patterns.

And that’s your lot – have a great Wednesday everyone.

I mean it may not be a surprise to you that this week’s BotW is the new Emily Henry. I’ve enjoyed her previous books so much that I was hoping this one was going to live up to my expectations and, luckily, it did!

Daphne moved to Waning Bay, Michigan because it was her fiancé’s home town. But when he decides that he’s actually in love with his best friend Petra, she finds herself stranded in a new town, where she may have her dream job as a childrens librarian, but she’s got no friends and will soon have no where to live either. So she does what any one would do – moves in with Petra’s jilted boyfriend Miles. The two would seem to be absolute opposites – Daphne is serious, practical and so quiet her colleagues think she might be in witness protection. Miles is scruffy and somewhat chaotic and likes listening to heartbreak ballads on repeat. But when the two of them get drunk together they think it might be a good idea to post deliberately misleading photos of the two of them together, and then, well things get even more complicated.

I read this in less than 18 hours. I was reading it on the train to work and I was cross when I had to put it down and get off and walk to the office. I was reading it on the train home, and was cross when I had to stop reading and get off the train – even though I was really hungry and wanted to go home for my dinner. And I finished in bed that night when I should have been going to sleep. Luckily I was near enough to the end that it didn’t end up being a 2am finish and the Bad Decisions book club.

I enjoyed Happy Place last year, but I liked this so much more. This is back towards the pure romance end of the spectrum, whereas Happy Place was closer to the Women’s Fiction end. This was back to Book Lovers levels of enjoyment for me and I would happily have read another hundred pages, especially if those pages included more comeuppance for Daphne’s awful ex-Peter. The only thing I didn’t really understand – to start with at least – was why Daphne would have been with Peter in the first place, but Henry did a really good job of making that understandable.

My copy of Funny Story came from NetGalley, but it’s out now and will be where ever you get your books from, because Emily Henry books get massive wide releases. It’s a hardback – so it’ll be at the airports in the large format paperback if you’re going on holiday any time soon – and of course it’s in Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!