A tricky choice for BotW this week – I loved the Ben Aaronovitch that I read last week, but it is the 5th in the series (not including comics) and you really should read them in order. And I already wrote about the first book Rivers of London in a previous BotW post 11 months ago and I recommended it in one of the Christmas Gift guides. So it felt a little overkill (so just go buy the first one). But the latest Angela Thirkell release from Virago was a lot of fun – even if it wasn’t my favourite of hers – but that bar is pretty high!
Northbridge Rectory is the tenth of Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels – they started in the 1930s and by this point we’ve reached the war years. There are officers billeted at the Rectory, where Mrs Villars is struggling to adapt to life as a Rector’s wife rather than a Headmistress’s wife. There are some transferable skills though… Northbridge’s unmarried ladies, widowed ladies and officious ladies are all out in force – taking control of the war effort and trying to assert their authority over each other as best they can.
Thirkell excels in creating believable grotesques – her books fill a similar hole for me as the Mapp and Lucia ones, except that in a Barsetshire novel they are the side dish not the main course. In this one we get a truly terrible officer’s wife – who has not idea how horrible she is, an old maid who likes to suffer and who has been cultivating a spineless writer who has his own issues, a vicar who is trying to escape the attentions of his elderly lady parishoners and an officer who doesn’t realise that he’s talking himself into a transfer.
A trip to Barsetshire is always fun and there are some familiar faces here too. I still think that Summer Half is my favourite – closely followed by High Rising and Pomfret Towers. I’m thrilled that Virago are reissuing them – even if I’m a little bit annoyed that some of them are e-book only because I wanted a matching set in paperback. Get your copy from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones or if you don’t want the paperbacks you can get the Kindle edition. I’m off to make puppy dog eyes at Before Lunch and try to resist breaking the book-buying embargo.
I had real problems chosing my BotW this week – a fair few things that I liked, but several were sequels where you really need to have read the preceeding book. So I went left field and I’m going for Mystery and Mayhem – an anthology of middle grade mystery stories.
Mystery and Mayhem in the wild! (ie a bookshop)
Now I was attracted to this because it has stories from Robin Stevens and Katherine Woodfine who I’ve read and really liked recently. But there are lots of stories to like here. They’re not all historical – some are set right here and now – they’re not all tie-ins to other books (and even if they are you don’t need to have read the novels they’re linked to), there’s all types of heroes and all types of mysteries.
I enjoyed them all – and even worked out who had done it a fair few times, which wasn’t a problem, because the introduction basically tells you to try and figure it out for yourself! I’ve also got a big old list of authors to go find more stories by now, but only once the pile is shorter obviously.
If you’re a grown up who likes kids books still (aka my kind of person) then this will fill an afternoon nicely. If you have a upper primary school age kid (aka middle-grader) who has read some Wells and Wong or some Clockwork Sparrow and is looking for something else to try, this would be a good place to find some ideas. Equally if you’re desperate for your under 11 to get into murder mysteries but you think they’re too young for Agatha Christie (they probably are, I got the heebie jeebies from reading Miss Marple and Poirot in year 6) then this would really work really well for them too.
My copy came from NetGalley, but I’m hoping this is going to be everywhere – I know it’s in Waterstones because that’s where I took my photo – but here’s the link for Amazon, Kindle and Foyles as well. Go forth and read crime for kids!
Difficult choice in the BotW stakes this week, but both options had a historical feel to them. It was between the second of Tracy Grant’s Charles and Mélanie Fraser books and the first in Jodi Taylor’s time travelling adventure books. And as you might be able to tell from the title, it was the Grant that won – in part because I really liked the first book in the series but I happened to read it in the same week as The Glittering Art of Falling Apart and it lost out in the BotW stakes that week. So this – perhaps more than ever – comes with a warning about reading the series in order. On that subject, more later. First, the plot:
Charles and Mélanie Fraser are not your average society couple. The Napoleonic Wars are over, but danger still lurks in the streets of London. There’s something rotten in the Ton and the source of the answers may well be closer to them than they could possibly realise. Assassination, espionage, and secrets in Charles’ family all add up to a fast paced, twisty and complex spy adventure.
With the end of Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series, I’ve been on the hunt for something to fill the Nineteenth Century set spy novel shape in my reading life. And although Grant’s series actually started before Willig’s, I’ve discovered them the other way around. I can’t remember how I first came across them – but it’ll probably have been an if-you-like-this-try-that from either Amazon or Goodreads (and probably based on purchasing Pink Carnations or Deanna Raybourn) and for that I am grateful!
These aren’t timeslip novels, but they do jump backwards and forwards in Charles and Mélanie’s lives – sometimes within the book, but definitely within the series – this was the second book to be published, but is set before the first. And on top of that, the chronological order list on Goodreads gives it as book seven!* But given the events of book one – about which I don’t want to say too much – I suspect reading them in order may have the most impact and will give it the most layers and nuance.
Charles and Mélanie have a complex relationship – founded in necessity, complicated by love and built on secrets. Charles’ family is just as bad. Possibly worse. Add that to a murder and conspiracy and all in all it makes for a gripping page-turner of a book, with more secret compartments than James Bond’s suitcase and some incredibly devious twists and turns. It’s not for the faint-hearted/weak of stomach in places, but it’s worth a bit of queasiness for a historical mystery this good.
I’ve already bought the next one (which is only available on Kindle) and may have put an order in for an actual copy of Book 4. Now prices are variable on these – I’m not sure they’re all published over here (the UK), so the later titles are imports and more expensive. But for the most part the Kindle prices are more reasonable. The first book is Secrets of a Lady (originally Daughter of the Game) and is under £3.50 on Kindle at time of writing but nearly £10 in paperback from Amazon (although they do have second-hand copies for less). Beneath a Silent Moon is under £3 on Kindle and only available second-hand via Amazon. It gets even more complicated later on, but as I said, do start at the beginning…
*And to complicate things further, mid series the lead characters’ names change to Malcolm and Suzanne Rannoch. Not that I’ve got there yet, but my head is already aching!
Back to detective fiction for this week’s BotW which is Alan Bradley’s fifth Flavia de Luce book. Unusually for me these days, I’m reading this series out of order – I read the first book first, but the only others I’ve read in the series are the two which follow this one.
In Book 5 we join our heroine as the village is preparing for the exhumation of their local saint from the church yard to mark the 500th anniversary of his death. But when they open the tomb, instead of a skeleton they find the recently deceased church organist and the pre-teen detective can’t help but start to investigate…
In the first book, Flavia trod a fine line for me – between engagingly and clever and irritatingly precocious. In this book (and the other later ones that I’ve read) she’s smart, with some pretty peculiar interests, but doesn’t ever cross too far over into preternaturally omnipotent! Aside from her sisters, most of her relationships are with adults and I enjoyed watching how the different adults interact with her – and their varying success (in her opinion) in treating her “properly”.
This was a fun page-turner, I had my suspicions about the culprit but couldn’t figure out the hows and whys – but the explanation was ingenious. I’m obviously still enjoying the series despite reading it out of order – you should be able to find Flavia’s adventures (where ever you want to start with them) in all good bookshops and online or, as I did, at your local library.
Easter is upon us again – early this year – and so I thought I’d throw some suggestions out there for books for reading over the bank holiday weekend, or the Easter holidays if you’re lucky enough to have them.
The Night That Changed Everything by Laura Tait and Jimmy Rice
I love the cover of this book – can’t explain why, but it just speaks to me
Rebecca and Ben are perfect for each other – blissfully happy, they’re made for each other. But when a secret from the past is accidentally revealed, their love story is rewritten. Can they recover? Is it possible to forgive and forget? This came out yesterday (Thursday), but I was lucky to have an advance copy which I finished on the train home from work just after midnight on Thursday morning. I really, really, enjoyed Rebecca and Ben’s story – which, as you can probably tell from my synopsis, is not your traditional romantic comedy. It nearly had me crying on the train – which doesn’t happen very often (in part because I try not to read books that will make me cry on the train!) and I had trouble putting it down. I didn’t even notice I’d arrived at Euston on the way to work on Wednesday I was so engrossed – if it wasn’t the end of the line I would have missed my stop! On top of everything else going for it, I had no idea where it was going. I suspect this is going to be on a lot of beach reading lists this year – get there ahead of the game and read it now. I’m hoping this will be in the supermarkets and all over the place – but here are the traditional links: Amazon, Kindle, Waterstones, Foyles, Kobo.
Death of a Diva by Derek Farrell
Danny Bird has lost his job, his boyfriend and his home. So of course the logical solution to this is to take over a dive of a pub owned by a gangster and try and transform it into a fabulous nightspot. But then his big act for the opening night turns up dead in the dressing room surrounded by a cloud of powder that’s definitely not talc and he’s the prime suspect in a murder inquiry. This is funny and clever – I was laughing out loud as I tried to figure out who was responsible. Danny is a fabulous character – and is surrounded by a great supporting cast. There’s lots of potential here – this is another winner from Fahrenheit Press – who you may have noticed have been providing a lot of my favourite crime reads recently. Get your copy on Kindle and badger Fahrenheit on Twitter to get it on other platforms. I got my copy free when it was on promotion a couple of weekends ago (it came out before the Fahrenheit subscription) – this weekend their free book for Easter is Fidelis Morgan’s Unnatural Fire – which is high on my to-read pile – as I loved The Murder Quadrille as you may remember.
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
Harriet and her granddaughter Grace are governesses at the same house, nearly 50 years apart. Grace has been raised on stories of Fenix House – but once she’s arrived it’s clear that her grandmother may be a less than reliable narrator. I reviewed this for Novelicious (check out my full review here) and basically this is the book that is going to fill the Victorian-time-slip-upstairs-downstairs gap in your life. Secrets, lies, families, relationships -they’re all there in this twisty and intriguing book – which had me poleaxed at the end. If you liked Letters to the Lost, or the Mysterious Affair at Castaway House, or any of Lauren Willig’s stand-alone novels like The Ashford Affair then this is for you.
Jolly Foul Play by Robin Stevens
Hazel and Daisy are back on the detection trail after Deepdean’s new head girl is found dead during a fireworks display. I haven’t finished the latest Wells and Wong mystery yet (it’s another that came out on Thursday – I started it as soon as my pre-order dropped on to my kindle) but if it’s half as good as the other three it’ll be a delight. One for the 8 to 12 year old in your house – and your inner child as well.
What am I going to be reading this Easter weekend? Well, I’m hoping to finish Hazel and Daisy’s adventures on my Good Friday commutes, then I think I might try to fill the Night Circus-shaped void in my life with Ben Aaronovitch’s Broken Homes or my urge for more time-slip books with the rest of Beatriz Williams’ latest or Lucinda Riley’s The Seven Sisters. Any other recommendations gratefully received in the comments – although I’m meant to be on a book-buying ban!
This week’s book of the week is Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. In another tale of the state of the pile, this was a Christmas book from my mother in 2014. In my defence, it did get a bit misplaced for a while in a storage box and then got shuffled to the bottom of a pile it shouldn’t have been on – but thanks to my mum’s habit of writing dedications in the front of gift books I have the guilts. Sorry mum.
Anyhow, everyone else read this 18 months ago at least, so I’m behind the curve, but in case you are too, The Night Circus tells the story of Le Cirque de Rêves and some of the people who live there. The circus arrives without warning, is only open at night and is filled with enchantment and wonder. The book focuses on several characters in particular, but to say much more is to say too much. It covers decades in the lives of the key players – starting before the invention of the circus and switches backwards and forwards through time as you learn some of the secrets behind the Circus of Dreams.
I started it before those pesky nightshifts and it took my brain some time to recover so it took me longer to read than how good it is. But once my brain was functioning normally again I gobbled this up. It’s clever and it’s magical but not too far from reality in many ways. It’s romantic and intriguing and I wanted more. I suspect I’ll be going back to reread this again and that I’ll get even more from it second time.
Magic! Illusions! Kittens! Clocks! Scarves! The Night Circus has all this and more – and now it’s got me wanting some more books with magical realism. I listen to Book Riot’s Get Booked podcast and there have been several people asking for books to fill a Night Circus-shaped void in their lives, so once I’ve got the pile sorted a little bit I may have to look into that. In the meantime, I’m ransacking the existing backlog for stuff that might scratch that itch. Luckily I still have some Peter Grant saved on the shelf.
Hello gentle reader. As you may have noticed, I do quite like a good romance novel. I’m more of a historical romance reader than anything else, but I do sometimes stray into contemporary and to a lesser extent paranormal. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why some books linger on the to-read pile and it’s led to me contemplating what my favourite and least favourite tropes are in the romance genre. Once you’ve figured out what you like and what you don’t like, it makes it much easier to wade through a genre where there are so many books to chose from. And it also makes it easier to work out what you might like when you’re trying a different type of romance from the ones you usually read.
Lets start with my pet hates…
Accidental Pregnancies/Secret pregnancies
Oof. I think this is my absolute least favourite. If an author that I adore writes one of these, I’ll probably read it, but apart from that I give these a wide birth. I think this is probably all bound up in my own fear of accidental pregnancy, but these do absolutely nothing for me except make me want to scream with rage. Accidental secret pregnancy plots will have me hurling a book across the room if I happen to encounter them.
Secret Children
Following on from the pregnancy problem, I like secret children only slightly better. It has to be really good for me to be able to get past the fact that you’ve stopped the child’s father from being a part of their life for x years. And given that the whole idea of the plot is usually that the heroine will reunite with the father, then the reason’s for the secret tend to be a bit lame/spurious. And as far as contemporary romances go, in the days of the internet and social media it’s easier than ever to keep in touch with people and harder than ever to keep this sort of secret…
Amnesia
Just no. Luckily you don’t find it very often any more (although there is a bit in one of my favourite author’s latest novels, but it’s a late on twist so I just about coped with it) because people have (thankfully) realised that Amnesia is rare, and if you’ve got it, you may well have other stuff going wrong too which is harder to fix. I can’t think of a single romance with amnesia as a main plot point that I’ve read and enjoyed. And I’ve been down lists of amnesia romances on Goodreads and it hasn’t jogged my memory either. I understand there’s a pregnant-with-amnesia sub-genre, which sounds like my idea of hell, although Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have a very witty review of the hilariously titled Pregnesia.
My favourites:
Girls dressed up as boys
Twelfth Night has been my favourite Shakespeare play since we studied it when I was 11 (side note: check out the amazing Globe production of it with Oscar Winner (squee) Mark Rylance as Lady Olivia – clip below!) and I love plots with girls dressed up as boys. From Leonie in These Old Shades, through Harriet in Duchess by Night, Callie in Nine Rules to Break when Romancing a Rake (and that other Sarah MacLean one which not a traditional “breeches” role and is a massive spoiler if you haven’t read the rest of the series) and many more besides, it’s a plot device that will often get me to pick up a new author. It’s usually only found in Historical Romance although if you know of any good contemporary ones, please put them in the comments!
Fake engagements
This is one has to be deployed cleverly, because breaking an engagement would ruin the heroine socially so she’d have to have a good reason to do it, but it’s popular device in more recently written historicals, there’s something I love about couples who enter into these for nerfarious reasons of their own and get more than they bargain for. Because of the above social consequences, it’s not a plot often employed by my beloved Georgette Heyer – I can only think of one fake engagement in her books and that’s False Colours, which almost doesn’t count because Kit is pretending to be his twin brother throughout in a lovely twist. Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I is a great example
Marriages of convenience
Following on from those fake engagements, I do love a marriage of convenience plot, although conversely I think my least favourite Georgette Heyer is A Civil Contract – but she does have some crackers too like April Lady and Friday’s Child (my mum’s favourite). When cleverly executed they can be wonderful fun – Eloisa James’s The Ugly Duchess, Mary Balogh’s At Last Comes Love and Quinn’s To Sir Philip with Love is a fun twist on the idea. To be honest, it’s fairly hard to mess up a marriage of convenience – there are lots of ways a lady can accidentally get compromised – and there’s lots of reasons why people might enter into one (keep lands, escape an evil guardian, get an inheritance etc).
I do read other stuff of course – I like house parties, rake-y heros, beta heros, guardians and wards (but only the sort who don’t do anything about it until the wards are of age), friends to lovers, best friend’s sibling and much much more. To be honest, beyond my pet hates above there’s not much I won’t give at least one try (except the Tragic Lives aisle of the bookshop). All recommendations for things that might tick any of my boxes are gratefully received – in the comments below please!
Back on the cozy crime for this week’s BotW with G M Malliet’s first St Just mystery. I’ve read a couple of Malliet’s Max Tudor series before – dishy vicar with a Past in rural village – which I’ve enjoyed so I was interested to read more from this author.
Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk is a best-selling mystery writer, who delights in tormenting his adult children by constantly rewriting his will. Then he announces his engagement and the whole family gathers to “celebrate”. But when his eldest son and heir turns up dead, suspicion, greed and malice run riot in the house. Detective Chief Inspector St Just and Sergeant Fear must try to track down the killer before someone else ends up dead.
The whole Beauclerk-Fisk family are hugely dislikeable and this adds a certain something as you read about their machinations (some subtler and cleverer than others). There’s also a lot of references to classic crime – so if you’ve read a lot of Christie you’ll enjoy that too. Sir Adrian has distinct Luther Crackenthorpe tendencies and is stuck writing books about a detecting spinster who he has grown to hate and tried to kill. His writing methods and plot accuracy (as described) also feel like a bit of a comment on someone too.
DCI St Just features less in this than I was expecting, so you don’t really get to know him massively, so I’d need to read another book in the series to make a proper judgement, but he comes across as quite well – fairly inoffensive, not overly flamboyant or extravagant – and obviously as a police officer he has a perfect right to be investigating the crime which was not the case in one of the other cozies I read recently which didn’t work anywhere near as well.
It’s not perfect, but it is a fun mystery with a good few twists before you find out who actually did it. Get your copy from Amazon or on Kindle. My copy was second hand – but I have seen some of Malliet’s books in store in The Works too.
This is a strange BotW post for me to write – as there were two other books that nearly beat The Murder Quadrille last week, and nothing that I liked as much as them this week. But I have a rule about not carrying over picks that weren’t used in a previous week. So Shawn Reilly Simmons’s Murder on the Half Shell gets the nod – but I enjoyed it more this paragraph implies. Trust me, keep reading!
Murder on the Half Shell is the second book in The Red Carpet Catering Mysteries. The plot: Penelope Sutherland runs a catering company that works on film sets, she’s on an island in Florida catering a movie – but it’s not all plain sailing. The director is difficult, the leading lady has a seafood allergy and it is hot, really hot. Then two of the waitresses she’s been using go missing after a crew party and Penelope’s former culinary school instructor turned celebrity chef is the prime suspect. But she’s sure he didn’t do it and starts to look into it herself.
Food-related cozies are such a massive trend at the moment. There’s a lot of cupcakes, bakers and coffee shops and so a catering company is a nice variant. One of the problems I often have with cozy series is that there’s a lot of murder going on in a very small area. I’m not sure how long a real cake shop/coffee shop/bakery would last if bodies kept turning up outside them and that does sometimes affect how I feel about a series as it goes on – depending obviously on how the author handles it. But the location catering idea means that there’s potential for the series to move around a bit. This of course makes it a little harder to maintain a large gang of supporting characters, but it does stop the Cabot Cove effect. The flipside is that with location moving around does it does mean that the murders might start to seem to be following the lead character around – the Jessica Fletcher effect. But there are ways and means of dealing with all of these issues – and we’ll see how Red Carpet Catering copes if the series continues.
Penelope is one of the more appealing heroines I’ve recently read in the genre too. She’s not too stupid to live (or at least not often), she’s not too obviously encroaching on police territory in a way that would get her arrested and she still manages to spend enough time at her business (or have staff manning it) that you can see that she’d stay solvent. I guess I’m trying to say that Murder on the Half Shell has a good premise, lead character and is solidly executed. I did think that some of the set-up and diversionary tactics were a little heavy-handed at times – the “obvious suspect” evidence particularly – but it wasn’t enough to annoy me. It’s not as humourous as my favourite books in the genre, but again, that’s not really a problem if the mystery is interesting – and this one is.
Murder on the Half Shell was a perfectly nice way to spend a couple of train journeys – my copy came from NetGalley and I liked it enough to go back and get the first book in the series from there too. If you fancy dipping your toe in the world of cozy crime on location, you can pick it up on Kindle (for £1.99 at time of writing).
This week’s BotW is Fidelis Morgan’s The Murder Quadrille – which is another Fahrenheit Press crime novel (that subscription I purchased is turning out to be a good move so far). Honorable mention goes to The Little Shop of Happily Ever After by Jenny Colgan – but that got a mini-review in my Half Term Reads post, so it’s not entirely left out!
This is really hard to summarise without giving the plot away, but I’m going to try. The Murder Quadrille opens at a dinner party being given by a businessman to impress his bank manager. His (really quite annoyed) wife is doing the food. Also invited is their lawyer and his trophy girlfriend and an American crime writer. Talk around the table turns to the dead body that’s turned up on the Common, but is that a good idea?
I liked this so much. It’s dark and funny and clever and you never quite know what’s happening. The narrative moves around from dinner guest to dinner guest – often jumping at just the point when you think you’ve worked out what’s happened, only to reveal another twist that you didn’t see coming. Brilliant.
This is so difficult to categorise – it’s not a detective story, but if you like cozy crime it’s not really very bloody or graphic – although it is blooming creepy – and really quite thrilling. I can’t really think of anything that’s really similar, although in the initial stages Suzette A Hill’s Francis Oughterard series came to mind – but it got much more complicated than that very quickly!
Get your copy of The Murder Quadrille from Amazon Kindle or investigate the possibility of a Fahrenheit Books Subscription here. I’ve had three books through the subscription (which I bought for myself, on the recommendation of a friend) and read two of them so far and really enjoyed both. The price has gone up since I purchased – but so has the number of books they’re publishing this year, so it’s still a saving.
