Happy Friday everyone, and it’s another mystery series today, but this one aimed at middle grade readers. And I do love a good middle grade book. And sometimes a bad one if you look at some of the terrible lesser known Girl’s Own books I’ve read over the years!
So the Taylor and Rose series is the follow on to Katherine Woodfine’s Sinclair Mysteries and features the same main characters, Sophie and Lillian, who are running a detective agency but also doing work on the side for the secret service agency. It’s in the years running up to (but not reaching) the First World War and the overarching plot that runs across the series is around a shadowy organisation who are trying to disrupt the world order and even maybe start a way by sowing discord between nations. Thus means there is plenty of scope for international travel as you can see from the titles of the books.
I really enjoyed the original series and this is a great continuation, that widens the world out and feels like it’s for slightly older readers in the same way that the main characters are slightly older. These are adventure capers more than mysteries and probably do need to read these in order to get the most out of them because of the over arching storyline with the secret society. I read the first two a couple of years ago and the last two over the last month or so and it worked really well.
You should be able to get these really easily in bookshops with children’s sections – and the first one (or even the set!) would make a great Christmas book for the 10-12 year old in your life.
I’m back with a post of mysteries set in theatres because I’ve read a few of them recently. I did a post of theatre-set books a couple of years back and most of those were mysteries, but not all, but do take a look back at that too. There’s a bit of a theme here, because they’re all books in series, but they can all be read standalone without you missing anything crucial to follow the plots.
Hattie Steals the Show by Patrick Gleeson
This was my purchase at the Notting Hill Bookshop and turns out to be the second book featuring Hattie, which I didn’t realise at the time. Our plot is thus: Hattie is a stage manager, who has a job teaching at a stage school but it’s the summer holidays and has taken a couple of weeks cover work on a West End show for a friend. But when she turns up to shadow the job, they find a body in the theatre and one of Hattie’s old friends is the chief suspect. And so she starts to investigate, which leads her to a country house for a week long workshop of a new musical where a lot of the suspects will be. The author is a stage manager himself so I loved all the detail on that in the book, although I did have a couple of the plot twists worked out before they happened. But it’s got a lovely easy style about it and doesn’t info dump on you, to the extent that I really want to read the first book to see how much of the backstory was in that and how much was a new reveal in this. I really hope there are more too.
A Deadly Night at the Theatre by Katy Watson
This is the fifth book in the Three Dahlias series and sees two of the trio starring in (different) West End plays. But there is discord in the group as one of the stars of Caro’s show is Luke, an actor who has a history with Posy. Rosalind discovers this when she arrives in town to see the two shows, but then Like is found dead in Post’s dressing room everything lols on the verge of falling apart. While Posy holes up at her flat, Ros and Caro investigate, but are they really sure it wasn’t Posy? As you know I really like this series and i like the way that Katy Watson keeps finding them new settings for the Dahlias so it doesn’t feel obviously like one cursed literary franchise.
A Howl of Wolves by Judith Flanders
This is the fourth and final book in the Sam Clair series, and sees Sam and her boyfriend Jake at the theatre when a real body appears on the stage. As I said in my post about the series, Sam is a great character, but the supporting characters are also a joy, and in this one they are really front and centre – because the reason Sam is at the theatre is because her upstairs neighbours are in the play. There’s less of the publishing world detail in this one – or at least it’s less obviously publishing related, but we also get a good dose of Sam’s frighteningly efficient mum Helena. This is the hardest to get hold of of the series – it only came out in hardback and isn’t on Kindle (yet) but if you do spot a copy somewhere it’s worth it.
Murder at the Playhouses by Stuart Douglas
A slight theme is going on here as this is the second in the Lowe and Le Breton series, following on from Death at the Dress Rehearsal. This sees Edward and John taking on parts in a Shakespeare production in the gap between filming of series of Floggit and Leggit. They’ve been recruited because one of the company has been sacked for drunkenness. John is worried about the potential for Sir Nathaniel turning up to reclaim his job and making a scene – especially because he knows him – but then a body is found. This is fun, but it’s a little bit overlong and could have done with another editing pass because I spotted a continuity mistake in there (which really bugged me!) but I really like the characters and I hope we get a third one at some point.
The TV adaptation of Reverend Richard Coles’ first novel in the Daniel Clement series arrives on TV soon so I thought now was a good time to write a series post about them, although I’ve already written a few bits about them in other posts.
Lets start with a reminder of the set up: It’s the late 1980s and Daniel Clement is Canon of the parish of Champton, a seemingly quiet and sleepy village (albeit a fairly large village judging by the number of shops it has!) where secrets are hiding below the surface. Murder Before Evensong sees battle lines being drawn in the village over a proposal for a lavatory in the church. You wouldn’t think that could lead to murder, but when it comes to parish rivalries, anything is possible! Trust me, I’ve seen things. One of the things that I like about the books is the fact that I can recognise a lot of the processes and ceremonies of the church as very similar to the ones that were happening in the parish church that I went to as a child.
There are four books and a Christmas novella in the series now and so far Coles has managed to find different places and set ups to put Daniel in so that Champton doesn’t quite feel like the St Mary Mead or Cabot Cove of the Midlands. So in book two he’s in a neighbouring parish that is being merged with Champton. In book three he’s taken a sabbatical from his day job to go back to the monastery where he trained and in book four there’s a movie crew filming at Champton House.
As you can see from the trailer above, the adaptation has Matthew Lewis aka Neville Longbottom as Daniel and Amanda Redman as his mother Audrey. It’s going out on Channel Five, which means it could go either way for me: I really liked the first couple of series of their All Creatures Great and Small adaptation, but I haven’t had a lot of luck with their other mystery series. But I remain hopeful and I may yet report back…
Happy Friday everyone and I have a romance series for you this week, because all three of these are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and so now is an ideal time to read them if you haven’t already.
So Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert series is three connected romances featuring cast members from a TV show that is somewhat Game of Thrones inspired. God of the Gates has been wildly popular but some of the actors (and the fans!) aren’t happy with the turn that the plots have taken. In Spoiler Alert, one of the stars is taking out his frustration with that by anonymously writing fan fiction, which is how he meets April although of course she doesn’t know who he really is. Then – both unknowingly – they meet in real life when Marcus asks April out after one of her fan costumes goes viral because she is plus size. When they start dating, he realises who she is and how is he going to detangle that one. All the Feels was a BotW, so there’s a full review of that already but it sees Alex assigned a minder by the show runners to keep him out of trouble until the final season airs. And Shipwrecked finds two actors who had a one night stand who find themselves co-stars and stuck filming together on a remote island for the duration of the series (because their characters are shipwrecked there) and so really need to not do anything that could end up in them hating each other and still having to work together. But when the series ends, they finally give in – but the trouble is they both have very different plans for the future.
You don’t really need to read these in order – but they do all take place at basically the same time (or at least parts of them take place at the same time) which makes for a really fun experience if you do read them all even if not in the proper order. Olivia Dade writes rom coms – these are funny as well as sexy and I like her characters who aren’t cookie cutter romances heroes and heroines. She was one of the first romance authors who I read who was regularly writing plus sized heroines or slightly older couples, by which at this point I mean in their 30s or up*, and I appreciate that too. I think I’ve re-read the first two twice each now – and probably the only reason I haven’t re-read Shipwrecked is because I own it in paperback so it’s not handy on my Kindle in the same way. They make great sunlounger books, so if you’re planning a late summer trip, these might be a good choice for you.
These are available in paperback as well as on Kindle Unlimited, and surprisingly given they are in KU at the moment, they are still on Kobo, although they are somewhat pricey there and they aren’t linked together as a series, so here is Spoiler Alert, All The Feels and Shipwrecked over there too.
*which given the amount of romances that have early 20s or college age characters at the moment is very welcome to me. New Adult seems to have subsumed the who genre.
It’s been more than a month since I picked a murder mystery for book of the week. Can you believe it? I can’t – and even when I went back and checked I still sort of didn’t believe it. But it’s true, so who says there’s no variety in my reading. And there’s more murder mysteries coming tomorrow in the Quick Reviews, but first let’s talk about The Last Supper.
Prudence Bulstrode is a retired TV chef. But when one of her former rivals is found dead in the garden of a house where she was catering a shooting weekend, Prudence is called in to replace her. Farleigh Manor is notorious for an unsolved murder from a century ago, but when Prudence arrives she is soon convinced that Deirdre’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but murder. And while her granddaughter, who she brought along to keep her out of getting into (even more) trouble starts investigating the old murder, Prudence sets out to solve the new one.
Rosemary Shrager is a chef who has been a semi regular on British TV for about 20 years now and before that she ran her own catering company, so the setting for this falls very much into her area of expertise and it shows. I personally have never been on a shooting weekend, but it very much felt like she had and all is those details really worked. I also found this quite humorous – with the tension and generation gap between Prudence and Suki, but couldn’t work whether that was deliberate or not. But does it matter if it was or wasn’t? The only disappointment to me was the eventual solution to the murder, which without giving spoilers about what precisely happened, I didn’t quite feel like the reader had all of the pieces for it to work as well as I wanted it to.
But it was a fun read that I finished in an afternoon and evening and I will definitely keep an eye out for the sequel (there are two now) to see if the humour was deliberate!
I bought my copy of The Last Supper secondhand and I’ve seen it in the shops fairly regularly. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
Happy Friday everyone, I’m back with another mystery series to talk about after I burned through three of the four books in this series a couple of weeks back, after having read the first one ages ago when it first came out and then forgetting to go back and follow up. Which, you know, is fairly typical for me given the state of the tbr pile…
Our amateur detective is Sam(antha) Clair, an editor for a small-ish publishing house who finds herself caught up in a string of murders across the course of the four books. The first book was a Murder of Magpies, where Sam’s caught up in a police investigation when someone decides that they really don’t want one of her books – a tell all about the fashion industry – to be published. In the second book, A Bed of Scorpions has one of Sam’s friends in trouble when his partner at the art gallery is found dead. In book three A Cast of Vultures Sam is caught up in neighbourhood drama when an house being used by squatters burns down and a body is found in the wreckage. And finally in A Howl of Wolves a trip to the opening night of a play, starring her friends from one of the other flats in her building, turns to tragedy when a real body appears hanging from the rafters instead of a dummy.
Sam is a great character – but she’s also surrounded by a cast of supporting characters who really make this sing. There’s her frighteningly clever and well connected solicitor mother, the handsome police inspector, Sam’s goth-y assistant and the various other people who live in the other flats in the converted house where she lives. I love a reoccurring character in murder mystery series and this has lots of really good ones. Sam hates conflict and will avoid (potentially) difficult conversations like the plague and means her relationship with Jake (sorry for the spoiler) the policeman who becomes her boyfriend has some real moments – where she should be telling him things and finds ways to avoid doing it.
Only three of these are available as e-books (although they are in Kobo plus in the UK at the moment if you’re a member there), the fourth is only available as a hardback, which I bought myself as soon as I finished reading book three because I really wanted to find out what happened next. These are Judith Flanders’s only novels as far as I can see, the rest of her writing is non-fiction history and while I’m sure they’re really good and interesting, it’s a shame because these are great and Sam is the sort of character you would like to have as a friend.
It’s been a few weeks since I had a British Library Crime Classic as the BotW: it was early May that I picked Tea on Sunday so I think I’m allowed another one now.
The victim in Not to be Taken is John Waterhouse, who dies after a gastric episode which all of his friends think is accidental. But his brother doesn’t agree and forces an exhumation. Further investigations show that he was killed by arsenical poisoning and the police set out to try and figure out who was responsible. We see the story from the point of view of one of the friends, Douglas, who is a country gentleman farmer. Over the course of the book we learn more about all the characters and the options for who might have killed John become wider and wider.
Not to Be Taken was originally published as a serialisation for readers themselves to solve, with a prize available for readers who could answer the question “who was the poisoner” correctly. This BLCC edition has the solution provided, after telling the reader that they should now be able to work it out. This is very twisty and very clever. I had some ideas, but like the readers at the time, none of them were totally accurate. I’ve read a couple of of Anthony Berkley’s other books, including Murder in the Basement which was also a BotW (four years ago!) but I think this is the first of his that I’ve read that doesn’t feature his regular detective, Roger Sheringham. It’s well worth a look – I’ve had a mixed run with the more recent BLCC releases, but this is a really good one.
It’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means it isn’t on Kobo, but as I always say, these rotate through the various schemes and offers so add it to your watch list and it will come around soon I’m sure. And just to flag that for some reason the Kindle and paperback versions of this have some how ended up listed separately on Amazon, which is annoying but seems to be happening more than you would expect at the moment.
The first book featuring Sally Smith’s barrister and (very) reluctant detective Gabriel Ward was a BotW back in April and as the sequel is out today and I read it as soon as I could after finishing that first one, today I have a bonus review of it for you.
We rejoin Gabriel in the run up to Christmas 1901 where he is about to tackle a difficult libel case, representing an actress who says that a tabloid has impugned her reputation. But then a mummified hand is delivered to the Temple’s treasurer and Gabriel is once again pressed into service to try and find out what is happening without inviting the police into the Inner Temple. And as more body parts arrive – including one with a fatal consequence – it becomes clear that someone has got a grudge against the Inner Temple itself.
Sally Smith has come up with another twisty and intriguing mystery and has also continued to build out the world that she created in the first book. Gabriel’s world and circle continues to expand, and his cloistered and sheltered life is a great device to enable her to explain the background to things and the rules of the world without it feeling like an info dump. And Gabriel’s growing friendship with Constable Wright makes for a great unlikely duo who actually compliment each other really well.
I would have read another one of these straight away had that been an option, so the sooner Sally Smith can write a third one the better – and hopefully enough people will buy this to get in on our shelves this time next year. My copy came from NetGalley, but my paperback copy of the first book came from a bookshop so I’m hoping this one will be findable in stores too. I’ll certainly be looking out for it. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too.
Happy Friday everyone! After breaking the rules on Tuesday with my book of the week, I’m back with another later in series book for this Friday’s series post, but I have a reason for this. It’s two years since the previous book in the Emmy Lake series and book four came out last week and I have read it and I wanted to report back.
So the first thing to say is that my prediction that the fourth book would arrive in 2025 was right, and the second thing is that this series is now complete! We rejoin Emmy and the gang in 1944 and by the end of Dear Miss Lake we finally reach the end of the war. In book four, Emmy and the team at Woman’s Friend are trying to find ways to keep morale up on the Home Front as the war drags on, but also starting to think about what might happen afterwards when it’s all over. Emmy’s journalistic career continues to flourish, and her husband Charles* is finally posted back in the UK. But there are still some challenges for the team to face before Victory in Europe finally arrives.
I’ve enjoyed reading this series so much, but every one of them has made me cry at some point – and this one is no exception. And without spoilers, it wasn’t (only) happy tears about the war finally ending for everyone. There is still peril in this one and it’s not insignificant peril. But it’s a book set in wartime, so it wouldn’t feel real if no one in the core group was ever in danger. I’m probably the most avoidant I’ve been of books with potential for deaths of key characters at the moment (murder mysteries don’t count) but I enjoy this series so much that I read it in the run up to release last week (thank you NetGalley for coming through on the copy for me) because I wanted to see how it ended. I’m sad it’s over, but I enjoyed it so much, and I look forward to seeing the characters that A J Pearce creates next.
As I just said, my copy was a preview copy, but it is out now in hardback and on Kindle and Kobo. You really should read the other three books first though to get the most out of it and the good news is that I’ve seen them in in shops on the regular so if you want to read them you shouldn’t have too many issues. Side note: the Audiobook for this series is read by Anna Popplewell, who was Susan in the three Chronicles of Narnia movies that came out about a decade ago.
Have a great weekend everyone!
*yes that’s a spoiler, but it happens in book 2 so what can I do?
Another mystery book this week, this time a new to me author writing mysteries set in the 1930s.
In Death and the Conjurer, a celebrity psychiatrist is found murdered in his study – but the door was locked and there seems to have been no way for anyone to have committed the crime. The Scotland Yard detective calls in magician turned sleuth Joseph Spector to help solve a seemingly impossible murder.
And this really does seem to be an impossible one. The solution when it comes is clever and well worked out and as the book says the clues are there, even if I didn’t believe it when the book said that! Inspector Flint and Spector are a good duo – they both have their strengths so it feels like a pretty equal relationship rather than a stupid cop and a brilliant amateur. It’s also the first of three so there are two more for me to read now too.
This one is in Kindle unlimited at the moment and so if you’ve got a membership it’s worth a look.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 