So, we’ve just passed the first anniversary of the death of Elizabeth II, and this week the third novel in S J Bennett’s Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series is finally published in the USA – so I’m taking the opportunity to remind you of my post about the series from November last year, which was when Murder Most Royal came out in the UK. When I wrote this series post, this was due to come out in the US in early 2024 – so there’s clearly been a delay on that, I’m not sure why – it could have been a knock on of the supply chain issues that pushed things like Sherry Thomas’s seventh Lady Sherlock book back from fall 2022 to early 2023, or maybe it was bumped back to avoid the Coronation? Anyway, if you’re in the UK, the paperback of this came out earlier in summer. The fourth book is due out here in February 2024 and is called A Death in Diamonds. It’s available to pre-order now, and judging by the blurb centres around a mystery set in 1957 – which if it is entirely set in 1957 will be a new departure for the series and might answer the question about what might happen with this series now the Queen is dead. I’m looking forward to reading it.
So as I mentioned in the Week in Books post, we’ve been on holiday, and although I’ve already told you about We Could Be So Good , The Lost Summers of Newport and The Mysterious Mr Badman, but I have a couple more reviews from my holiday week of reading. You’re welcome. And by a weird quirk, they’re all murder mysteries of various types. Who knew.
Lets start off with The Sea Breeze by S J T Riley. This came out last year and is a murder mystery set in 1950s Devon. A crime reporter at a London paper receives a call from an old friend after a boat is found abandoned in the harbour with one crew member dead and others missing. When he arrives in town, he finds his friend is missing and the locals are closing ranks against him. But that’s not going to stop him investigating. This throws you in without a lot of explanation and the pacing is a little spotty at times, but it’s a pretty well-executed murder mystery that will appeal to you if you like things like the BLCC titles that are set at sea (or near the sea).
Next up is A Death in the Parish, which is the second historical mystery from Reverend Richard Coles. I said that I would get to it didn’t I! I read the first Canon Clement book last year and I enjoyed that one, but this one definitely feels like he’s settling into writing cozy historical crime books. He’s established his late-1980s rural set up in the first one and in this one he gets to flesh out the characters and the world and show the aftermath of the events of the first one. And if you haven’t read the first one, this one will spoil the murderer in that – so that’s worth bearing in mind if you’re thinking of going in fresh to the series with this. But the mystery is good – and the clash between Daniel’s style of ministry and that of the vicar in the neighbouring parish is good, especially if you have ever been involved in a parish church and the various different factions that you get in one. There is a third one coming – and I thought I knew where some of the running strands were heading towards the end of the book, only for it to surprise me at the last so I’m looking forward to seeing where this is going to go next.
And finally and less successfully my latest attempt to try and find another mystery-thriller type series in the vein of things like Janet Evanovich’s Steph Plum or Carl Hiassen was Cultured by D P Lyle – which mentions both of those authors in its blurn. This is the sixth in a series (but it’s very clear that you can read them standalone) about a retired professional baseball player whose PI father gets him involved in investigations. In Cultured, he’s asked to try and infiltrate a self-improvement programme by an anxious mum after her daughter who was working there disappears. Is The Lindemann Method a scam? A Cult? A front for something else? Jake and his girlfriend Nicole are going to find out. This had all the elements that I wanted in the blurb, but just didn’t really work for me. It doesn’t really have the humour of Evanovich or Hiassen and Jake doesn’t have enough personality to carry a book. Add to that a lot of focus on how attractive the various women are, some unexpected changes of Point of View and pacing that means it doesn’t quite flow and it didn’t really work for me. Never mind.
That’s your lot for today, but there are a couple more things that I read on holiday that I suspect will pop up on here in the future – but I’m going to leave you guessing as to what they are!
As I mentioned yesterday, I read both of the physical books that I took with me on holiday this time – and today’s pick was one of them. To be fair, I did pick what I was taking quite carefully and this was one I’d been looking forward to reading.
The Lost Summers of Newport is a three-stranded story about a Gilded Age Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. Set in three different points in the mansion’s life, each is connected to the other, and you move between the three. In 1899, Ellen is just started a job as a music teacher at Sprague Hall, to help an heiress snag an Italian prince. In 1959, Lucky is living at Sprague Hall with her husband Sty, who she married when she and her grandmother fled Mussolini’s Italy. Her husband is a womaniser and an alcoholic but she’s worried what a divorce would do to her young daughter. In 2019, Andie is working on a TV home makeover show that’s featuring Sprague House as its latest project. She wants the programme to focus on the history of the house and restoring it – but the network higher ups have different ideas. On top of that, the house’s reclusive owner has two conditions to filming – don’t talk to her, and don’t go near the boathouse. And she has two grandchildren who don’t want the TV crew there at all.
This was a really good book to read on the beach or by the pool. Because you’re switching between timelines it comes in nice sections so you can read a bit, go for a swim, read a bit more while you dry off, go for an ice cream, read a bit more – you get the idea. And in case you didn’t get it from the description, this has got some Gilded Age Rich People problems stuff going on. And there are Vanderbilts and society rivalries here galore in the two plots in the past. My enjoyment of books set in periods like this is well known – whether it’s novels or non-fiction – and so that worked well for me, particularly with the element of high society rubbing up against the seamier side of life. The different story lines gives more scope to layer secrets and see characters at different stages of their lives.
But of course the downside of having three plot strands to a book is that you can often wish that you got more time with each strand – or with one strand in particular. And there is a little bit of that with this, but it actually works together really well, especially when you consider that the book has three authors – and that each author writes one storyline (or at least that’s what the readers guide at the end says).
I read Beatriz Williams‘ and Lauren Willig‘s solo novels – and have written posts featuring some of them – although I haven’t read any of Karen White’s other books. This is the second of their joint efforts that I’ve read and I liked it more than I remember liking the first one. If you’ve read Beatriz Williams other novels you’ll spot some of the same families popping up here, which is a nice Easter Egg.
The paperback of this came out in July – and I had it preordered and so I’ve actually got to it quite quickly in the grand scheme of things – but it’s also available in Kindle and Kobo as well as in an audiobook with a different narrator for each strand.
I’m just back from a lovely week in the sunshine on holiday and I think youcan tell from the reading list. In a minor miracle, I read both the books I took with me to read on holiday AND the two books I bought at the airport, and I started on the book Him Indoors took with him to read. This is unheard of – I have a terrible record for taking books with me, then buying something at the airport and reading the new ones and then going back to the kindle. So well done me. And I also made some really good progress on that still reading list – I will get there, I will! Anyway, a nice and very varied week of reading all in all. And now – back to work…
On the same afternoon as I wandered into Waterstones Piccadilly, I also had a very nice half hour wandering Hatchards down the street, and today I present to you the fruit of my trip. Hatchards has been a bookshop since the last years of the eighteenth century and is London’s oldest bookshop. If you’re a historical romance reader, you’ll be familiar with the name as bookish heroines are always dropping in there to buy books. Sadly it does not have a romance section, but it does have some other stuff going for it!
It won’t be there any more, because the auction is over but I couldn’t not mention the Freddie Mercury window that they had – as they were selling the auction catalogue book (and may well have been the only place to get it other than Sothebys). Other than that the downstairs is pretty much what you would expect from a long established bookshop – lots of serious fiction and non-fiction, which as you know is not my thing, so I’m not going to bother you with pictures of that. What I am going to show you is their crime section – which while not quite as big as the Waterstone’s Piccadilly one (which takes up the other half of the big front room that the romance section is in) but it is one of the biggest I’ve seen in central London (much bigger than Foyles Charing Cross Road) AND has the added bonus of also having some collectable second hand books as well as the new stuff.
I’m starting with this picture because I know most shops have tables of books, but most of them don’t have antique-looking dining tables full of books – if i was to guess how they were picking stuff to go on here I would say it’s the accessible end of detective, but with some wildcards thrown in . I was pretty pleased with how much of this I had read to be honest – including (but not limited to) The Christie Affair, The Maid, The Grantchester series, The Eyre Affair, The Mary Russell Mysteries, Death Goes on Skis, the Richard Coles and the Richard Osman.
This is the start of the alphabet – it goes around from your left as you walk in from the front – and as you can see it’s got a good selection of the classics you’ve heard of – like Margery Allingham’s Campion series, the long running cozy series like M C Beaton’s Agatha Raisin and Hamish MacBeth, with the thrillers that are too scary for me and everything in between. And on the end you can see the expensive collectible stuff…
And you’ve got the same mix at the end of the alphabet – including the biggest selections of Maisie Dobbs paperbacks that I’ve recently seen, most of the Nicola Upson Josephine Tey mysteries, some Patricia Wentworths and The Three Dahlias along with a Jo Nesbo that’s clearlyin the wrong place!
As well as being in the right place in the alphabet so to speak in the crime room, there’s more British Library Crime Classics in the classic fiction section at the front of the first floor (you can see the Wodehouse and the Agatha Christie in the background) – including a whole bunch that I’ve written about – including Murder of a Lady, Death of a Bookseller, the Cheltenham Square Murder, These Names Mean Clues and more.
I just wanted to throw this in too – it’s the historical fiction selection – which has everything from Georgette Heyer, through the C J Sansom Tudor murder mysteries and the Andrew Taylor Restoration ones, with all the literary fiction bits in between!
And finally, they’ve also got a pretty good selection of the pretty Terry Pratchett Hardbacks that I’m not meant to be buying but find very hard to resist…
Look! Through the rain you can see the real Wild Cat Island – aka Peel Island on Coniston Water! Despite the terrible weather I had a wonderful long weekend in the Lake District the other week and our theme was Children’s literature – so we did the steam yacht on Coniston so we could see Wild Cat and get a bit of water time in a slightly more relaxing way than sailing a dingy like the Blacketts and the Walkers. And given the weather – which included a thunderstorm as well as the torrential rain you can see in the picture – that was probably a good idea.
We also went to Grasmere to see Wordworth’s grave, and we also got rained on there. But given that I really don’t like Wordsworth (thank you A Level English Literature) i was slightly less forgiving of the rain there than I was in Ransome country.
Anyway to mark the trip, have a throwback post to my Swallows and Amazons series post from last summer after I went to book conference. And yes it was some of my book conference gang that I was hanging out with!
This Thursday I wanted to mention one of this week’s new releases – because the second (and final?!) book in K J Charles’s The Doomsday Books series* is out. A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel is another landowner and a smuggler romance – this time it’s a former soldier who has unexpectedly become an earl and the son of a notorious smuggling clan that operates in his newly inherited patch. Our smuggler is Luke, who we met in the first book, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, in circumstances that I can’t really go into without giving away a lot of plot, but which do mean that I suspect that if you’ve read that book you’ll have a more satisfying experience with this, beyond just potential glimpses of previous couples if you know what I mean! Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading it once I can get my grubby hands on it!
*is it a series if it’s only two books? A duology? What if you don’t know if there’ll be a third or not?
This week we have the latest in my occasionalseries of round-ups of books in the British Library Crime Classics series. I’ve readquite a lot of them now, so we’re a even further into the more recent releases – so even more forgotten section of their books, but there are still some good books to be found there
The Black Spectacles by John Dickson Carr
Poisoned chocolates are not exactly unknown in detective fiction, but this is a really good example. A young woman is suspected by her village of having planted poisoned chocolates in the village sweet shop. The local landowner stages a memory game to try to prove his own theory about how they could have been poisoned – and ends up dead himself. And it’s all on film. The crime is seemingly impossible, and yet someone has done it and Dr Gideon Fell is going to figure it out. It’s really good and really clever and keeps the level up all the way through. I’ve only read about half a dozen of John Dickson Carr’s mysteries, but this is one of my favourites of them – Til Death Do Us Part was a BotW and if you liked that, you’ll probably like this too.
Suddenly at His Residence by Christianna Brand
I’m working my way through the Christianna Brand books that are available from in the British Library Crime Classics series as they become available in Kindle Unlimited. I think Green for Danger is still my favourite, but I enjoyed this one more than Death of a Jezebel. This features a grandfather with a complicated family life who is found dead the morning after saying he would change his will. There are a lot of people who wanted him dead, and a crime that seems very hard to have committed. It’s set while World War Two is still going on (1944 to be precise) and although it was published in 1046 so it doesn’t quite have the same sense of not knowing what would happen that Green For Danger has, but it still has lots of wartime detail that adds to the mystery and setting. A very easy and interesting mystery.
The Mysterious Mr Badmanby W F Harvey
And finally one from the thriller-y the end of the British Library Crime Classic collection. The Mysterious Mr Badman features a a mystery that starts with the nephew of a blanket manufacturer agreeing to mind the bookshop below his lodgings for an afternoon and three men coming all looking for the same book by John Bunyan. From there, it turns into a murder mystery with political overtones, the morals of which you may or may not agree with, but that will still manage to sweep you along while you’re reading it. I nearly called it a caper, but that’s not is not really the right word when there is murder involved. but think 39 steps, but with a book and a murder at the heart of it. Not bad at all.
This week’s BotW is one of the books that I picked up on my buying spree while writing last week’s Kindle Offers and that I couldn’t help but read pretty much straightaway (within a week counts as straightaway for me) because it has a pretty cover and it was sitting there on my Kindle and Cat Sebastian is just so reliably good.
This is set in the world of newspapers in New York in the late 1950s. Nick is from the rough end of Brooklyn and has gone into journalism despite the disapproval of his family. Andy’s dad owns the paper and has sent him to work in the newsroom as part of the process of finding out how the business works. The two of them shouldn’t get on, and yet they do and soon they’re friends. Except that Nick really wishes it wasn’t just friends, but he knows that that’s all that’s possible. Isn’t it?
This is a very sweet slow burn love story. But its also low on angst and despite the 1950s setting you don’t need to worry too much about Bad Things Happening to characters because they’re gay. And you can argue about whether or not that is realistic or not, but I chose to believe that happy endings were possible and I think Cat Sebastian has done a really good job of figuring out a scenario where Nick and Alex can have one. I spent most of my time reading this with a big soppy smile on my face and really that’s what I needed. It’s sweet and romantic and it has a couple at the centre of it who get each other and want to make each others lives better in little ways and big ones. They’re both just happier when the other person is around them, preferably around them and happy. And there’s a really cute bit with a Cat. Perfect reading when you need a happy ending to make your day better.
I can see some people on Goodreads complaining about the fact that it’s written in the third person present, but honestly that bothered me so little that I didn’t even notice before I saw the reviews mentioning it. But to be honest, it’s very rare that the Point of View of a book bothers me – unless it’s second person, or the POV is inconsistent in some way. I can’t help that I’m not fussy like that!
As I mentioned at the top, I bought my copy on Kindle because it’s on offer at the moment for 99p, and the good news is it’s on offer on Kobo too. You’re welcome. I’m super pleased it’s on offer at the moment because it only came out in June and my experience with Cat Sebastian is that it’s unusual for her books to be at discount this quickly. So snap it up while you can and thank me later.
Something of an actual book reading spree I have to say. Partly because I got given a few Girls Own books at the weekend and they were sitting right in my eye line on the sofa and partly because the pile is getting wildly out of control. I should probably do a post about it but I’m not sure I can bring myself to contemplate it. Anyway, a real mixed bag of reading.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 