Category: genres

Book of the Week, cozy crime, historical, mystery

Book of the Week: Deadly Summer Nights

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Happy Tuesday everyone and today’s pick is a first in series historical cozy crime that I picked up when I was spending that Waterstones gift card before Christmas.

Our setting for Deadly Summer Nights is a holiday resort in up state New York. It’s 1953 and it’s the second season that Elizabeth has been managing Haggerman’s Catskill’s Resort. Her mother is a former actress and dancer and inherited the resort – and although she’s using her connections to book entertainment acts for the resort, it’s her daughter who is doing all the hard work on the day to day. And because it’s the 1950s and she’s a woman, not everyone is pleased about that – or prepared to listen to her. The last thing they need is a dead body at the resorts, but that’s what they’ve got. And in the dead man’s cabin the chief of police finds a copy of The Communist Manifesto and suddenly everyone is claiming that the resort is a hotbed of communists. But Elizabeth isn’t convinced and sets out to try and figure out what happened herself.

I really, really enjoyed this. The setting is fun and a bit different – even if I was really annoyed on Elizabeth’s behalf at all of these useless men who wanted to dismiss her. I do like a historical murder mystery and I haven’t read a lot that are set in mid-century America outside of a big city like New York. And the resort setting is a lot of fun whether it’s modern or historical- I’ve read Kathi Daley’s series set on a resort and I would happily read more if they appear.

This is also my first Vicki Delaney novel – although I have read one of her books under her Eva Gates pen name. There is only one other book in this series so far – and I will try and get hold of it to see what happens next. This has the start of a promising love triangle going on and I hope there’ll be clues in that about whether there will be more – Delaney seems to have a lot of series going on under her various names and I don’t know enough to know which ones are still active.

My copy came from the lovely cozy crime bookshelf in Waterstones Piccadilly, and I think it’s going to be a special order if you want the paperback version. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

mystery, series

Mystery series: Marlow Murder Club

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Happy Friday everyone and after all the quiet of December we have loads of new releases starting to come through and so today’s post is about one of the series that I’ve been enjoying which has a new instalment out this week: The Marlow Murder Club.

In the first book, Judith, who is in her late 70s and is a crossword setter for The Times, witnesses a murder while out swimming in the Thames and when the police don’t believe her, sets out to solve the crime with the help of local dog walker Suzie and Becks, the vicar’s wife. In books two and three they’re investigating the deaths of local grandees and gaining a certain amount of local notoriety as well as a a grudging alliance with one of the local detectives. The new book, Murder on the Marlow Belle features the local amateur dramatic group, whose founder member is found dead the morning after a river cruise with the group’s most famous former member. And it has the bonus of one of the characters being called Verity, which is always fun, although Veritys don’t have a great record in murder mysteries – Verity is after all the victim whose murder Miss Marple is trying to solve in Nemesis.

I particularly like this series because one of my ex-boyfriends lived in Marlow so I spent a bit of time around there over the years and it’s always fun when places that you’ve lived in or know well are in Books! More than that, these is just so easy to read – a bit like the Richard Osmans are, although in a different style. They’re written by Robert Thorogood who also came up with the idea for the death in Paradise TV series and books. We watched a lot of Death in Paradise over Christmas and you’ll be glad to hear that the books are a bit more complicated than Death in Paradise episode but you can see a lot of the same sort of things going on here.

There was a TV adaptation of the first book last year and they needed two episodes to get through all the plot. They’ve made a couple of changes for the TV series – for example Samantha Bond is at least a decade younger than Book Judith and is playing her as more her own age than the book. And as I said when I wrote that post about the adaptation I find them more obviously comedic on TV – in fact it’s almost too cringe for me. But in the books I don’t notice that and I really like them. Of course it does post a question of what’s gonna happen with when the Thursday Murder Club comes out as a movie. What am I going to notice in the adaptation that I didn’t in books and am I going to enjoy that as a movie as much as I enjoy the books. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Anyway, you should be able to get hold of any of these pretty easily, I’ve seen them all over the shops. My copy came from NetGalley – hence why I’m up to date for once! As I said at the top, the new one came out yesterday, so you can get that on Kindle and Kobo now, and the other three are at reasonable prices as ebooks at the moment too: here are the Kindle and Kobo links to those too. And indeed there’s already a preorder link up for an as yet untitled fifth book – due this time next year!

Have a great weekend everyone

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews, romance, romantic comedy

Book of the Week: The Rom-Commers

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It might be December, but today’s pick isn’t a Christmas book (sorry), it is a literal beach read from my holiday last week. But even if you’re not on a sun lounger right now, I think it’s still a pretty good option for a bit of escapist reading if that’s what you need.

Emma has always wanted to be a screenwriter – she’s studied for it, she’s obsessed by rom coms and she’s been writing her own for years – and she’s won contests with them. But she’s not in Hollywood hustling for gigs, she’s in Texas looking after her dad. That is until she gets a call from an old friend to offer her the chance to work with a legendary screenwriter. Charlie Yates has won all the awards you could think of but the screenplay for his new movie sucks. It’s a rom com written by a man who doesn’t believe in love – and it shows. Charlie is Emma’s writing idol so she heads off to LA for six weeks to doctor his script. Except when she gets there, he doesn’t want to work with her and he doesn’t even care about the script, it’s just a means to an end. But Emma isn’t letting her big chance go without a fight…

Now I love a Rom Com – I’ve actually been revisiting some of my old favourites recently (with somewhat mixed results, but that’s a story for another day) so as a premise this was right up my alley. And this has got all the banter and sparks flying that you could want. Emma and Charlie are a chalk and cheese duo on the surface but as you get to know them you realise how perfect they are for each other underneath. It’s got a third act twist that made me worry that I’d missed a “a novel” disclaimer on the front, but it was OK in the end. I don’t think I would have able to write about it if it had broken the rom com conventions that it was writing about – unless I was rage-writing any way.

I enjoyed Katherine Center’s previous two book Hello Stranger and The Bodyguard, but I think this is my favourite of hers yet. And I’m looking forward to seeing what we get next too.

This is out now – it’s a relatively recent release in paperback so I haven’t had a chance to check out the bookshops to see how easy it is to find in person, but I’m hoping it shouldn’t be too hard. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy reading!

bingeable series, cozy crime, detective, series

Bingeable Series: Museum Mysteries

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Happy Friday everyone, I’m back with a cozy crime series that I blitzed my way through over a couple of months, and although I’m still annoyed that the final book is a different size to all the others, I enjoyed them enough that I’m trying to work past the issues it gives me for shelving them and writing about them anyway!

At the start of the series Nell Pratt is the chief fundraiser at the Society for the Preservation of Pennsylvania Antiques, when an archivist is found dead on the same day that it’s discovered that a collection of letters from George Washington is missing. Of course she starts to investigate – this is a cozy crime series after all – and thus a series of museum/antique related mysteries is underway. Like most similar series, Nell develops a group of friends and colleagues who help out with the investigation and there’s a running romantic subplot through the series too.

I bought the second in the series at Bristol this summer – and once I’d read it, I went off and started buying up the others and then read them in order. I really liked the set up of the museum and philanthropic community around Philadelphia – it felt like something a bit different after a lot of small business related cozies. I don’t know a lot about the way the museum sector works behind the scenes in the UK, let alone in the US so I have no criticisms to make on that front – I just enjoyed the mysteries and the characters and let it all unroll!

I haven’t read any other Sheila Connolly – and I was sad to see when I was digging around into her writing to find that she died in 2020. But she has other series that I will happily work my way through should the opportunity present itself.

This is another of those times where most of a cozy crime series isn’t available on Kindle – only the last one is in ebook format, and I didn’t realise when I ordered the paperback it that it was going to be a non-matching size – if I had I might have gone with the ebook.

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

mystery, series

Mystery Series: The Secret Bookcase

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Happy Friday everyone! The fourth in Ellie Alexander’s new series based around a bookshop in California came out on Wednesday, and I have read all four of them, so now it’s time to write about them!

Our heroine is Annie Murray, a former criminology student turned bookseller at the Secret Bookcase in the small town of Redwood Grove in California. IN the first book, The Body in the Bookstore, she’s looking to try and boost the shop’s prospects by expanding into events – but of course a body turns up and she needs to solve the crime or the shop will end up in an even worse situation than it was to start with. Investigating the murder is one of her former professors, who also tries to entice Annie back to the world of criminology which she left after her best friend was murdered – in a crime which remains unsolved. And thus we have the template for the series so far – Annie organises an event and there’s a murder, and in the background she’s trying to decide between bookselling and criminology but with the running thread of that unsolved murder of her best friend in the background.

These are really easy to read, well plotted cozy crime novels. Annie has a nice group of friends around her which make for good secondary characters, and the events mean that there’s been a variety of locations where the murders have taken place, not just in the bookshop which helps with the “How is this business still going given all the murders” issue of the small business cozy crime. I have a little less patience with the best friend murder running strand than I do with the crime of the week (so to speak) but that’s probably because it’s going so slowly and I just want it wrapped up and sorted. But given the structure of the books, I get why it’s not happening fast.

In an astonishing turn of events, the first of this series only came out in June, and we’re already up to book four – with book five coming early next year. I’m assuming Ellie Alexander had a few of these stacked up already because the first two came out on the same day and then we’ve had another one every three months so far since, so we’ll see how long that pace can keep up, especially given as she has a couple of other series too. They’ve used various comps across the four books – some of which I don’t agree with because they lean towards the comedic and I don’t really see that in these, but generally, if you like a small business cozy crime, these may well work for you.

Anyway, I read the first one and the fourth one via NetGalley, but two and three thanks to the wonders of Kindle Unlimited. And that of course means that these are only on Kobo as audiobooks.

Have a great weekend!

detective, Forgotten books, mystery, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: BLCC round-up 2024 edition

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It’s been a while, but here I am, back with another post of some of the really good British Library Crime Classics I’ve read recently. And recently is a fairly elastic thing, because I started putting this together ages ago, and then some of the books that I was expecting to use in this ended up being Books of the Week instead!

Impact of Evidence by Carol Carnac

This is set in the Welsh borders where an elderly doctor known for his erratic driving has gone off the road and into the river – but when the police pull out the vehicle a second body is discovered in the back. Who is the mystery corpse, how did he get there and was the doctor responsible? This is another mystery centering on a tight knit community where everyone knows everyone else’s business and so clues can be picked up that way. Really good and atmospheric.

Excellent Intentions by Richard Hull

This is a murder mystery about the murder of a deeply unpopular man, who drops dead on a train to London. There are four suspects, and the story is told by intercutting the investigation by Inspector Fenby and judge sitting watching the prosecution at the trial – which he intends to be his last case before retirement – without telling you who the accused is until very late on. I really enjoyed reading it – I wasn’t sure who I thought the accused was going to turn out to be, and then I very much enjoyed how it all revealed itself and what the solution turned out to be.

The Measure of Malice Edited by Martin Edwards

A collection of murder mystery short stories all with some sort of scientific twist to them. There are some authors here I haven’t come across before along with some familiar names if you’ve read other BLCC titles and then two really big names in Conan Doyle and Dorothy L Sayers. Not being a Sherlock Holmes expert I can’t tell you if the story here is one of the better known ones, but I can say that the Sayers is a Wimsey that I have read before in one of the Wimsey short story collections, which probably isn’t a surprise, although it is a good one (even if I think bits of it clash with part of the first Paton Walsh continuation, but that’s a really nerdy point). All in all a good and varied selection.

And that’s it – and I can’t see that I’ll have read enough of these for another round of of BLCC before the end of the year, although who knows whether one will end up as a Book of the Week before then in the six weeks we have to go…

Happy Humpday everyone!

Book of the Week, cozy crime

Book of the Week: A Dark and Stormy Murder

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This week I’m back in the cozy crime genre for my pick, and with a first in a series so I’m abiding by the rules (yes, those rules I set myself!).

And so the plot: Lena’s just landed a job as the assistant to her favourite writer, Camilla Graham and moved to a small town in Indiana. Lena has always wanted to be a writer and now she gets to learn from her idol. Lena’s best friend already lives in Blue Lake – in fact she’s the one who met Camilla first, but Lena quickly gets stuck into small town life and meeting the locals – including a notorious recluse and the chief detective. But when a body turns up on her boss’s land, and strange things start happening at the house Lena can’t help but start investigating…

This has a fairly classic cozy crime set up in many ways – small town, two potential love interests for the heroine and a developing group of friends. But the writing as a profession is fun and the actual murder plot is good and allows the development of Lena and Camilla’s working relationship as well as doing some world building work too. There’s also a secondary investigation going on that is setting up more for the series, so it feels quite action packed – and I mean that in a good way. At the moment Lena seems to be picking my least favourite of the two love interests but there’s plenty of scope for either him to grow on me or for her to change her mind. This is my first book by Julia Buckley, and there another five in this series and she has a couple of other series too so that’s something to look forward to, if I can just get the tbr under control…

I read this one in paperback, but it’s also available on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

mystery, series

Mystery Series: Agatha Raisin

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The 35th in Agatha Raisin series came out yesterday in the UK – and the first nine are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so it seemed like a good time to write about M C Beaton’s Cotswold-based mystery series.

Agatha is a middle-aged public relations agent, who at the start of the series sells her Mayfair firm so she can retire early and move to the Cotswolds. She soon finds herself caught up in a murder investigation – after she tries to ensure that she’ll win a baking competition by buying in her entry only for one of the judges to drop dead after eating it and she has to clear her name. Soon she’s stumbling over murders where ever she goes and gaining a reputation for her detective work, until in the fifteenth book she sets up her own private investigations agency.

Agatha is originally from Birmingham where her parents lived in a tower block in a slum and she has dragged herself up through her own efforts. She’s prickly, she doesn’t really understand the countryside and she hides her vulnerability under a hard shell that very few people actually see through. There is a regular cast of characters alongside her who help to smooth her path – and smooth off her edges. From the local police force there is Bill Wong, who is the first friend that she makes after moving, then there is Mrs Bloxby the vicar’s wife who helps her navigate the village, Roy Silver who used to work with Agatha in London and who pops up from time to time and then James Lacey, Agatha’s handsome next door neighbour and Sir Charles Fraith a rich but stingy friend – both of whom are love interests of sorts at various points.

Agatha is 53 in the first book in the series and has remained “in her early 50s” throughout the whole series – they’re another series that I would describe as existing in the floating “now”* where time has moved on but the characters have remained the same age. Aside from the detective agency development, Agatha’s life remains fairly similar through the series – even if some times you think things are changing!

I originally read the first dozen or so back in the early 2000s, and then after reading too many of them in a row started to get a bit fed up with the formula (see above!) – which I’ve found is very much a thing with M C Beaton books as I have the same issue with Hamish Macbeth but also her historical romances. But as long as you read them well spaced out there’re a lot of fun – as are the radio versions with Penelope Keith. The TV series – which has Ashley Jensen as Agatha – is quite a different beast to the books and I suggest if you do do both then you may be need to separate them off from each other in your head, much the way I did with the Phryne Fisher books vs the TV series.

M C Beaton – aka Marion Chesney – died in 2019, but the series has continued – with book 31 onward being credited as “with R W Green”. I need to read some of the latest ones to see if/how the series has changed at all – the most recent one I’ve read is book 28 (and I’ve read all bar about two of the series up to that point) which probably takes you up until the point where the libraries closed for Covid, because that’s how I used to read them. I would go and borrow some more – but we all know how big The Pile is at the moment. But if you haven’t read any of them, do try the early bit of the series out via Kindle Unlimited.

Happy Reading!

*See also Elizabeth Peters’s Vicky Bliss series in a way, where the first book was written in the 1970s and the last book in the mid 2008s, where the settings remain fairly close to the time that they are written in, but Vicky remains about the same age.

Book of the Week, Forgotten books, mystery

Book of the Week: Tour de Force

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Once again my attempts to get another British Library Crime Classics post written is thwarted by picking one as a BotW. Hey ho. These things happen.

Inspector Cockerill is on holiday. He’s already regretting leaving Britain on a package tour by the time the plan lands in Italy, but by the time the tour group make it to a tiny island off the Italian coast the whole tour group is consumed with tension and rivalries. And then one of them is murdered in the hotel. Cockerill believes the killer must be one of the people who was on the beach with him and sets out to try and figure out who is responsible before the local police pick who they think is the culprit.

This is the sixth mystery featuring Inspector Cockerill and was first published in 1955. It contains some of the attitudes to foreign people that you often spot in British books of this era, but the difference between this and say, Shirley Flight – Air Hostess, is that I’m fairly sure Christianna Brand is doing that as satire – or at least for humorous reasons. The actual murder itself is a really cleverly constructed “impossible crime” and there are certainly plenty of people with motives for it. And when the solution is unravelled you see that all the clues were there and you just missed them. It’s pretty good.

This only came out in July – and it’s currently in Kindle Unlimited, which means you won’t be able to get it on Kobo at the moment. But the BLCC have published several other Christianna Brand books and some of them are not in KU at the moment so you should be able to get hold of those on Kobo if you want – and they’re petty good too. Green for Danger was a BotW as well and I’ve reviewed Suddenly at His Residence as well.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Children's books, children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Vicki Finds the Answer

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Another week, another BotW pick that is a little bit niche. But on the bright side, it’s another of my acquisitions from Book Con, so at least I’m bringing the tbr-pile down a little. And hoo boy, the plot to this one is crazy.

This is the second in the Vicki Barr, Flight Stewardess series, and it should be noted I haven’t read the first. Vicki is newly graduated from the stewardess school and is now being sent out on her first flights with Federal airlines. She’s living in a flat with five other stewardesses and has a bit of romance going on with a handsome co-pilot. SHe’s working on a short hop line and on one of her flights she encounters a young woman called Joan who is clearly in some sort of trouble and ends up helping save a timber business. Yes, you read that right a timber business. I now have a rudimentary understanding of how the timber business worked in late 1940s America, as well as the methods of fire-watching and fire fighting that were in place for forested areas. You weren’t expecting that were you? Me neither.

I feel fairly safe in telling you this, because I don’t think any of you are going to be buying this one. So I also don’t mind spoiling the plot a bit further and telling you that Vicki also rescues her younger sister from drowning in an icy pond, takes a crew of hunters up on a flight to a shooting trip – and one of them shoots a window out on the plane on the way – and that the denouement of the timber plot involves landing the plan on a track in the middle of the fire and then a life or death fight. All this in under 200 pages. You’re welcome.

The good news is that unlike her British equivalent, Shirley Flight, Vicki’s plane doesn’t crash. Shirley is in a worrying number of crashes over the course of her series, but in this one at least Vicki makes it safely down to earth at the end of all of her flights. It’s slightly random that a teenage air hostess is the one to work out how Joan’s father’s business partner is trying to put him out of business, and also that the guy who is organising the hunting trip is also a timber baron, but coincidences like that are the stuff of Girl’s Own adventure stories. And I love them for it.

There are fifteen other books in the Vicki Barr series and I’d happily read more if I can lay my hands on them at a sensible price because this is my sort of crazy. And unlike some of the other books of the ear, I didn’t spot any racism. Which is a low bar to be cleared, but there it is and the same can’t be said about some of the Shirley Flight Books. Helen Wells is also responsible for the majority of the books in the somewhat better know Cherry Ames series about a peripatetic nurse, some of which I’ve read as well and which are generally easier to get hold of.

My copy came from one of the sales at Book Con (the dealer one I think) and as it’s an American series, they’re not the easiest to lay your hands on if you want them. I can see a couple on the sales sites, but although the actual books are cheap there’s often a hefty whack of postage attached to them because they need to be shipped from somewhere else. But as I don’t think you’re going to be buying them anyway, it doesn’t matter – I just hope you’ve found this as entertaining as I did when I was reading the book!

Happy Reading!