Category: books

A truly bumper month of acquisitions. But the good news – if such there can be – is that I have read all the Elly Griffiths at this point, along with the Edmund Crispin so they’re not actually on the to-read pile any more, they’re now in search of a place on the actual shelves. And of course given that I own all of the series except the first one in paperback there is a non zero chance that my mania for sets (preferably matching) will lead me to acquire The Crossing Places in paperback too so I have the set. I will try and resist. The Julia Buckley happened to be in the Picadilly Waterstones when I was in there buying one of the Ruth Galloways and although it’s not the next one in the series I haven’t read, it’s so rare to spot these in a shop I bought it anyway.

The Ann Granger is the first Mitchell and Markby which I have read but don’t own. Its the same edition that I read it in when a very dear friend lent me her whole set to me by post nearly a decade ago. She very sadly died last summer – but it would have been her birthday this week so when I saw this in the National Trust bookshop at the weekend it seemed like a sign to acquire it and reread. And then of course I got distracted by the Corinna Chapman re-read so it hasn’t happened – yet. And the other two were also purchased at the same time – and were total impulse buys. I’ve never come across them before but they’re books two and five in a twenty year old cozy crime series so I thought I’d snaffle them as they were only £1 each. I’ll either like them or I won’t and I was supporting a good cause!

Have a great Saturday.

With the news of the death of Kerry Greenwood at the start of the week, I felt moved to embark on a reread of her contemporary mystery series set in Melbourne. It’s been a while since I read them, but I was still surprised to see that I hadn’t written about them here – especially given how much I’ve written about the delightful Phryne Fisher. So today I’m remedying that.

Corinna Chapman is a baker in Melbourne. She owns and runs her own bakery which is in the same building she lives in: a delightful creation of an apartment building called Insula. Built in the 1920s by someone with a bit of a fixation on the Romans when it came to design. On top of that, each apartment is named after a different Roman God and it has a delightful roof garden too. I would move in myself except that across the course of the books quite a lot of drama happens in the building and its environs.

The first book in the series is nearly 20 years old now, so there are some bits here that are a little dated, but Corinna is such a wonderful creation. She is a reformed accountant, divorced, a reluctant sleuth and happy in herself despite society telling her that she should be miserable because she weighs too much. This is written in the first person so you’re inside her head the whole time and her personal monologue is idiosyncratic and wry. The other residents of the building and in Corinna’s life are also amusing and fun. And of course there are murders to solve. Often more than one of them too – in the first book for example Corinna finds herself investigating who is terrorising the women of her building but also who is killing off heroin addicts in Melbourne.

There are seven of these, with the final book The Spotted Dog coming some years after the previous installment which had lead me to hope that we might still get another one, but it seems that wasn’t meant to be. So I shall console myself with a reread. I’ve never seen these in paperback in the wild here in the UK as far as I can remember, but the good news for the rest of you is that the first one and the third one are in Kindle Unlimited in the UK at the moment, even if I don’t much like the new covers they’ve been given.

Have a great weekend everyone.

The final event of the figure skating season is taking place as this publishes. The best skaters in the world at the moment are in Boston in the US to compete for the world title. Today (Thursday) sees the Men’s short programme and the medals being decided in the Pairs, which is not to be confused with Ice Dance which is the subject of today’s bonus review – of Layne Fargo’s The Favourites. I started reading this with a plan to possibly write about it to coincide with the European Championships at the end of January – but then the American Eagle crash happened in Washington DC, which killed a number of skaters – including former world champions and aspiring juniors and I didn’t feel reading a fun skating novel for a few weeks. But it is really good, and it does deserve a mention here, so I’ve found a chance to do it after all.

Katarina Shaw wants to be an Olympic skater and when she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely teenager stuck in the foster care system, the two of them become an ice dancing partnership – and a real life partnership. They don’t have money, they don’t have the best equipment or the best coaches, but they’re determined to make it to the top and they do right until they don’t. The framing device for this book is that it’s the tenth anniversary of their final skate at the Olympics when it all fell apart – and there’s an unauthorised documentary being made about them. This means that you follow their story from their initial meeting all the way to the Olympic games, inter cut with interviews from other people who were there – their rivals, the judges, the journalists.

Now I watch a *lot* of figure skating, and although I’m not a skater, I know a fair amount about how the sport works and the politics of it all. And my experience of fiction featuring skating has been a bit mixed – but I couldn’t resist this because it was getting comparisons to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, which as you know I really, really loved. So I took a chance. And it’s really good. Everything is turned up to eleven, but apart from all the (on ice) partner swapping, the skating details felt pretty flawless and Fargo has done a really good job of creating an alternative universe of the early 2000s Olympic cycles.

It’s also a real page turner, which doesn’t require you to know about figure skating to enjoy it – it will create the world for you. But if you are into skating, the areas of the sport where Fargo has taken liberties and made changes have been picked really well (and are often areas that fans of the sport complain about). And like another TJR novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, you can also have fun spotting which real life incidents and characters she has been inspired by when creating the storyline. I wouldn’t say that all the characters are tremendously deep or well developed, but there’s so much plot and it moves so fast that you don’t really notice until you’re looking back at the end.

My copy of The Favourites came from NetGalley, but it’s had a big, buzzy release and I’ve seen it in a whole load of bookshops over the last month and a half since it came out. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too at a pretty good price (for a hardback release anyway) of £3.99.