Category: Recommendsday

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Books with Sports

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We are closer to the end of the Winter Olympics than we are to the start so for today, I’ve got some novels with sports in them for you. They’re not all winter sports, but some of them are. There are also a whole bunch that I’ve read and not liked and haven’t included here – although I have included one of my more recent sports reads, because it made me cross and I needed to talk about it! And also the book that I was hoping to replace it with has also made me cross, but in a less interesting way. Anyway, I’ve also already written a Recommendsday about sports romances, so if you haven’t had enough yet, you can find that there.

The Favourites by Layne Fargo

Given that all the drama that came out of the Ice Dancing results (if you haven’t read about it yet, here are some articles), I couldn’t not start with Layne Fargo’s book about ice dance from last year. I wrote a bonus review about it around the time of Worlds last year, but it’s so much fun that it bears a repeat. This has got a scrappy wrong side of the tracks pairing taking on the world of ice dancing, and is framed through a documentary being made ten years after their final skate. It’s got lots of drama, the bits of the sport that Fargo has tinkered with are cleverly chosen and you don’t have to know anything about skating to enjoy it. I’m a huge figure skating fan – until Tuesday night I had watched every minute of competition this games, and this is one of the very few books I’ve read set in a sport that I’m a keen follower of that hasn’t managed to really annoy me in one way or another. There’s a reason why I haven’t read many/any of the figure skater (usually with a hockey player) romances that are having a resurgence at the moment. I read a few a couple of Olympics ago (Pyeongchang games I think) and they really wound me up and I haven’t been back since. But this I can really recommend.

Isn’t It Bromantic by Lyssa Kay Adams

Cover of Isn't it Bromantic

I’ve got an ice hockey-related romance for you now, and it’s not Heated Rivalry! Isn’t it Bromantic is the fourht book in the Bromance Book Club series, which have a couple of sporting heros. The first in the series had a baseball player hero who is trying to win his estranged wife back with the help of a secret romance book club for men, and the other books follow the other members of the group. Isn’t It Bromantic’s hero is Vlad aka The Russian who is a professional ice hockey player in Nashville. Years earlier back in Russia, he married one of his childhood friends to help her after her journalist father disappeared. It’s been a marriage of convenience, but Vlad has decided he wants more and is using the book club to try and work out how to win his wife’s love. This was the story in the series that I had been looking forward to maybe the most and although it didn’t quite live upto all my hopes it was still a fun read even if it did have far too many tropes all mashed in together. I found the series as a whole a bit uneven – full of great ideas but not always as good in the execution, which was a bit frustrating, but I don’t think any of them were actually bad if you know what I mean.

Cross The Line by Simone Soltani

Cover of Cross the Line

Dev is a Formula One driver who may have blown up his career prospects with a social media disaster Willow is his best friend’s little sister who is full of ideas but struggling to get a job out of college. Dev hires Willow to help with his image problem, but the two of them struggle to keep it professional as their feelings threaten to get the better of them. I am a massive Formula One fan, and have been for as long as I can remember and really I think this may make me a bad candidate for reading F1-set romances, because I will pick at the sporting detail. All that aside, this one has a massive plot device that it uses towards the end but then leaves unresolved that really, really wound me up. In fact it annoyed me to the point that I went back and read the final chapter and the epilogue again the day after I read it, because I had finished it late at night and I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t missed something. I hadn’t. So, all in all frustrating. And as I said at the top, it made me cross and I wanted to talk about it, but also people who know I read romance and like F1 often ask me if I’ve read any of the booming trend for F1 romances and so now I’m reporting back!

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: February 2026 Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month, and I’ve taken a break from watching the Winter Olympics for the time it takes to pull together the Kindle Offers. However if you are a Winter Olympics fan, it’s the Ice Dance Free tonight – could the Brits get our first figure skating medal in more than thirty years? Anyway, to the offers…

Cover of The Rom-Commers

I’m not going to lie, it’s not the best month for offers on stuff that I read. However, there are a few things. Katherine Center’s The Rom-Commers is 99p – this was a Book of the Week in December 2024. Get A Life Chloe Brown is 99p and in Kindle Unlimited too if you need a dose of Talia Hibbert in your life. How To End a Love Story is also on offer – this was a Book of the Week too, albeit I had a few reservations, but this made a bunch of best romances of the year lists in 2024 so others weren’t as conflicted as I was!

If you’re watching series four of Bridgerton and haven’t read An Offer from a Gentleman yet, then that’s 99p in it’s adaptation tie-in cover. Night Rider, which I mentioned at the end of January when it came out, is 99p this month – but I’ve read it now and can confirm that you shouldn’t be deceived by the pastel cover, it is a proper romantic suspense, but set on a cowboy ranch. I read Ava Wilder’s How to Fake it in Hollywood nearly three years ago, and her latest, Some Kind of Famous is 99p – I was mixed on that previous one but there was potential, so I’m definitely tempted to buy this one. I have the paperback of Love is a War Song on the pile, but if I didn’t I would be buying it on Kindle for 99p!

Natasha Solomon’s Cleopatra is on offer – I haven’t read this, because I don’t really read stuff set in ancient times, but I have read a bunch of her other more modern-set novels and enjoyed them, so if you do read ancient history-fiction, this may well appeal to you. The third Hawthorne Mystery, A Line to Kill is 99p which I’ve read, but so is Anthony Horowitz’s first Sherlock Holmes continuation The House of Silk. I also bought myself The Hollow Man which is 99p for reasons related to the latest Knives Out

On the Agatha Christie front, Dumb Witness from the Hercule Poirot series is 99p, and the Discworld is one of my all time favourite – Guards! Guards! – which is one of the entry points to the series. I read or listen to this at least once a year.

The Stranger Times by C K McDonnell is 99p – this is the start of a series

detective, Recommendsday

Book of the Week: Cyanide in the Sun

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We’ve reached the sixth Tuesday of 2026 and I’ve picked a British Library Crime Classic as Book of the Week. I haven’t quite made it to two months since the last time I picked a BLCC book, but given that I was disappointed by a couple of the things I read this week, I really had no other option…

Cyanide in the Sun is a collection of eighteen holiday-themed short stories. Among the authors are Christanna Brand, Anthony Berkley, Anthony Gilbert, Julian Symons and Michael Innes among others. I hadn’t read any of these before – which I think is because a lot of them were either published in newspapers or in hard to get collections. And the nature of newspaper stories means some of them are really quite short, but I enjoyed that about the collection – they were in and out and didn’t outstay their welcome if that makes sense. There are a few here that are really quite clever with nice twists that leave you surprised.

I find that short story collections can be a bit patchy – with the BLCC it can sometimes be because the stories aren’t as good as you want them to be, as opposed to there being something that’s been around a bit in them. But this is a good one with stories picked from some of the most successful of the recent BLCC authors. Here in the UK it’s definitely not the right time of year to be reading holiday stories if reading about sunshine and beaches when the weather outside is wet and cold gets you down, but personally I usefully find it a nice treat to be taken away from the worst of the weather. And last week was definitely in the worst of the weather category at times!

This one is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so it’s not on Kobo, but once it has rotated out of that it should be back on other ebook platforms. And of course it’s also available in paperback which you can get direct from the British Library bookshop where they have a three for two on the Crime Classics.

Happy Reading!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January 2026 Quick Reviews

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I’m not going to lie, this month’s Quick Reviews have been a tricky one to pick and write because as I mentioned on Sunday it was a bit of a strange month in reading what with all of the skating. I skipped a Book of the Week because of that, I read a few things that I’m going to use in other posts, and quite a few things that weren’t very good – or at least that I didn’t want to write about! But I’ve made it in the end even if it’s a slightly strange selection.

Managed Mayhem by Patti Benning

Lets start with something that I did like. As you know I’ve been working my way through a lot of Patti Benning mystery novellas, some of which have better premises than others – the motel one where people keep dying is a bit of an issue for me, because I definitely wouldn’t want to stay somewhere where a body a week is turning up, but the search and rescue dogs one at least has the excuse for why she keeps finding dead people. Anyway this is the first in a new series, once again set in Michigan where our heroine is Bridget who has been called in by her aunt to go and help with her novelty shop. The aunt is in Europe on holiday and things seem to be going wrong in her absence so she offers Bridget a free room in the apartment above her garage if she’ll go to Mill Creek and sort it out. Bridget has her own reasons for wanting to get away from her normal life but when she arrives in town she discovers a shop that doesn’t seem to have made any money in years, a missing store manager who then turns up dead in her aunt’s basement. The mystery is good enough but the potential for the series is better.

Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto

Gwen is a violinist, who has made it into the New York Pops Orchestra against the odds. Xander is the star of a classical crossover pop group who has inexplicably joined the Orchetra to play first cello. They don’t get on, but then Gwen is promoted to first chair – a job that Xander thought was going to be his and their rivalry kicks up a notch, right until it doesn’t. I read Julie Soto’s Forget Me Not a couple of years ago and althoug it was a BotW I thought it didn’t quite deliver on what it promised in the sample. But I liked the sample for this one (again) and went for it but this is another occasion where I missed a cue until too late because we’re back in the Reylo fic world. And I’m a bit over the tiny heroine and tall brooding misunderstood hero now because there have been so many (see also Love Hypothesis, and many others). This also suffers a bit from the fact that the heroine is a pushover, there is a comically evil villain and the whole Xander/Alex split started to drive me wild. But, judging by goodreads this has worked much better for people who are possibly less jaded than me!

A Deadly Affair by Agatha Christie

As you may have realised at this point, I’ve been working my way through the “new” Agatha Christie short story collections as they hit Kindle. We’ve had the seasonal collections and this on is themed around love and the depths that love can drive people too. There are all her big detectives included here but quite a few have been in other collections, so if you’ve done the other collections here, you may recognise some here like I did. On the bright side though, I’ve just started working my way through the David Suchet Poirot from the start as they have hit Netflix, and one of the early episodes I watched last week was based on one of the short stories in this that I read the week before!

That’s it for this month. May February provide me with better options for next month’s Quick Reviews. A final reminder of last month’s (less than usual) Books of the Week: Totally and Completely Fine, Meet The Newmans and Beattie Cavendish and the Highland Hideaway.

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: 50 States Mop-up 2025

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As you know, I’m not reading across the US in 2026 (and if you didn’t you can find my reasons here) but as the last act of my six year odyssey reading a book from every US state each year, here are a couple of the books from the tail end of the 2025 challenge that I have not yet written about for today’s recommendsday.

New Uses for Old Boyfriends by Beth Kendrick

Cover of New Uses for Old Boyfriends

Delaware is always a hard state to do, so after enjoying the first book in the Black Dog Bay series so much that it was a BotW last year, in the absence of anything else from Delaware I came back for book 2 this year. This is a fresh romance story, but linked to the previous one in that the characters from that pop up again. Our heroine this time is Lila who is back in the town she grew up in after her marriage imploded and career as shopping channel host came to a screeching halt. Back home she finds that her family’s money is gone and her mum is in denial about this. The only reason I didn’t like this as much as the first one is that I found Lila (and her mum even more so) a bit grating at the start, she’s such a princess and that’s really not my thing, but the character growth was so good that it was worth reading through my initial irritation! I am definitely going to be reading book three!

Savage Run by C J Box

This second book in the series sees Joe investigating after a massive explosion in his patch which the police say has killed a notorious environmental activist in a stunt gone wrong. But he’s soon discovering clues that seem to point to a conspiracy. These books are right on the edge of what I can deal with in terms of thrillers – the plots are amazing but they’re very violent and the only reason I can stick it out is because I know that it’s a long series so Joe has to make it to the end of the book alive!

Renewing Forever by Kelly Jensen*

Cover of Renewing Forever

This is a later in life second chance romance between two men who were childhood friends but whose relationship broke down just during the summer after high school. It also has as side order of trying to figure out what to do with an old resort in the Poconos for one half of the duo and a difficult relationship with a parent (and some associated money issues for the other). I enjoyed reading it once I got into it, but it was a bit of a case of why didn’t they just talk to each other at some point. I know that for Book Reasons they had to not do it, but 30 years is a lot of stubbornness!

And there you are. That’s the lot from this year, but here’s the equivalent post from last year as well.

Happy Humpday!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of January, and once again I’m back with the Kindle Offers that I’ve spotted that I think might interest you if you read this blog, or interested me while I was looking!

Copy of Mona of the Manor

There is actually not a lot that I’ve already read and recommended on offer this month – probably because I don’t read a lot of romantasy or creepy thrillers. But there are a few to mention. I’m going to start with a former BotW: Armistead Maupin’s Mona of the Manor. My love for the Tales of the City books is well known at this point and this is the tenth (and probably last?) in the series. Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, which was one of my 50 States books from 2023, is 99p as is the second Bridget Jones book The Edge of Reason and Amy Lea’s Set On You about a curvy fitness influencer is back on offer too.

On the buzzy books front there is Bob Mortimer’s The Hotel Avocado, Harlan Coban’s Run Away – presumably because the adaptation has just hit Netflix, and Hannah Grace’s Icebreaker which is one of a slew of ice hockey related romances on offer, presumably because of the imminent arrival of Heated Rivalry to our streaming screens. In other things I have’t read there is a T J Klune from a couple of years back The Bones Beneath My Skin which I didn’t buy but only because I still have two Klunes in the backlog and I have rules that I’m trying to stick to. Talking of rules I’m trying to stick to, Assistant to the Villain is back on offer – I bough this last year and still haven’t read it and really need to get around to it because there are already two sequels with a third coming in the summer. Also waiting to be read (as a paperback though not on the Kindle) is Ashley Herring Blake’s Dream On, Ramona Riley, presumably because the second book in that series, Get Over it, April Evans, is out at the start of February.

This month the Terry Pratchett are the second and third in the Discworld series, The Light Fantastic and Equal Rites. Frederica is the Georgette Heyer One of my favourite Katie Fforde’s is on offer too – Flora’s Lot is set in an auction house and has bonus kittens. Romancing Mr Bridgerton is back on offer too – this is the book that the last season of Bridgerton was based on. Sidenote: the new season drops at the end of the month and is Benedict’s story aka based on An Offer from a Gentleman (which also happens to be in Kindle Unlimited at the moment). If you’re in the market for historical romance, Mary Balogh’s Remember When from her Ravenswood series is on offer as well. In classics, Ross Poldark, the first in Winston Graham’s Poldark series is on offer too.

In things I booked while writing this post we have The Almighty Dollar by Dharshini David and Dan Jones’s Henry V book (which is £1.99 rather than 99p) which is positively restrained.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: December Quick Reviews

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The theme of this month’s quick reviews could be described as “reporting back” given that we have two books that I’d mentioned on release day that I’ve now read and I’m starting with a sequel to a Book of the Week from the start of last year.

Lies and Dolls by Nev Fountain

Lies and Dolls is a return to the world of Kit Pelham after The Fan Who Knew Too Much and sees Kit and Binfire on their way to Lincolnshire for the opening of a rare toy museum which will be housing some rare figurines from the Vixens of the Void series. Soon the figures go missing and start turning up in pieces. And then there are actual murders. I said in my review of the first book that it could have used being a bit shorter and that the plot was insane – this is even more outlandish on the plot front, but felt like it had had a tighter edit. The world is more absurd than ever, and Kit keeps making the wrong choices in her personal life, but it’s got plenty of black humour as well as another uttlerly bonkers mystery plot. Looking at the “Readers also enjoyed” choices on Goodreads, this is more unrealistic in many ways than the Peter Grant books – and they have magic – but it’s definitely less realistic than both the Andrew Cartmel series too but they are similar in some other ways.

Second Chance Romance by Olivia Dade

Cover of Second Chance Romance

Karl and Molly had crushes on each other when they were in high school, but nothing really happened. When they were at college they had an argument and never spoke again.Since then, Molly has become a successful audiobook narrator and Karl (although she doesn’t know it) is her most faithful listener, usually while he’s working in his bakery. When Molly sees an obituary for Karl she flies from California back to Harlot’s Bay for his funeral. Except that he’s not dead – and the two of them get a second chance to work out if that old connection was the real thing. I’m reporting back in on this one because I mentioned it on release day but although this is the second book in this series, you could read this as a standalone . That would would spoil the outcome of that first book as well as you missing out on the running humour that is Karl’s audiobook habits in that first book – so really, you should read At First Spite first. I really liked the relationship building here as Karl tries to show cynical and jaded Molly that he’s worth taking a chance on. And the Harlot’s Bay community continues to be a lot of fun providing plenty in the subplots as well as the romance.

You Had to Be There by Jodie Harsh*

Cover of You Had to Be There

This one took me so long to read – and I previewed it here when it came out – that I had to come back around with a review now I have finished it. I’m quite conflicted writing this review because I found the writing style quite hard going for large parts of the book – breathless isn’t quite the right word, but it is stream of consciousness and breakneck for the majority of the book, just like Jodie’s/J’s life was. And so that might be a stylistic choice, but that is one of the reasons why it took me quite a while to read. The other is that J/Jodie is also making some very bad choices at times and has a lot of traumatic events in his childhood and that is also quite hard to read. But this is a very honest book that is a glimpse into what it was like to be caught up in the Soho nighttime scene in the last years before Crossrail came and closed things down and knocked them down. The buildings that replaced them are shinier and more corporate and the things that were lost can never be replaced. But that’s the way of London – always changing and shifting and moving on to the next thing for more than a millennia. I’m lucky enough to remember seeing it before it changed – and after reading this I’ll be thinking about the communities and clubs that were lost every time I go down the escalators at Tottenham Court Road.

And that’s your lot. A reminder that the recommensdays in December had a strong Christmas theme – with series at Christmas 2, Not New Christmas Books and New Christmas Mysteries – and the BotWs were Season of Love, Murder Most Modern, Odd Flamingo, Heir Apparent and Buried in a Good Book.

Happy Humpday!

Christmas books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: New Christmas Mysteries 2025

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Happy New Year’s Eve everyone, I’m finishing the year with my last batch of Christmas reading of the the season in a post that was going to be new Christmas reads, but has actually turned out to be new Christmas Mysteries and so I have adjusted the title accordingly!

Miss Winter in the Library with the Knife by Martin Edwards*

And I’m starting with the book that I finished the most recently, because it’s the most different (I think) as it gives puzzle to the reader to solve as they go along. Six people have been invited to the remote and mysterious village of Midwinter for a Christmas Murder Mystery puzzle weekend. Their task is to solve the clues and work out who killed a fictional crime writer. But soon after they arrive as the snow falls and blocks them off from the outside world, a body is discovered. Was it an accident or is one of the group a murderer – and if so why? As well as writing his own detective fiction, Martin Edwards writes the introductions to the British Library Crime Classics series (more on them later) and literally wrote the book on the history of the murder mystery genre, and this is very much in that tradition, with a few nifty twists. I’m not a puzzle person (especially when reading as an ebook) but I’m sure that element will appeal to some, but I enjoyed the murder-within-a-murder nature of the story and the shifting points of view of the narrative which managed to both add to the reader’s knowledge and confuse them further about the solution. A lot of fun.

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson

Now I appreciate that I mentioned Nicola Upson in last week’s Recommendsday but for Christmas 2025, Nicola Upson has broken away from her Josephine Tey series to write a standalone murder mystery novella based around the genesis of the board game Cluedo (or Clue if you’re American) or at least the imagined version of it. At Christmas 1943, Anthony and Elva take a break from their war work to head to the hotel where they used to work before the war to run a murder mystery weekend. But when they arrive they find themselves caught up in a real crime. Can they work out what has happened before it is too late. I really enjoyed this – it’s under 150 pages but there are plenty of twists and turns and I raced through it. I got it on a 99p deal on Kindle and it was totally worth it.

Death in Ambush by Susan Gilruth

Lee has been invited to spend Christmas with her friends in a country village. But what should be an idyllic trip starts to turn sour when a Christmas party is disrupted by a new resident and then soon after another resident suffers a stroke and then dies. But rumours soon start that it was actually murder, and Lee finds herself working with the Scotland Yard detective who has been called in to investigate. Does it count as new if the book was actually written in 1952? I’ve decided it does because this is this year’s British Library Crime Classic Christmas offering. Lee is an interesting character and she has a prior relationship with DI Gordon from another book (also long out of print) that is slightly flirtatious despite the fact that she is married (which may not please some people) but it didn’t bother me because it made for a really interesting dynamic in a clever murder mystery.

The Christmas Alibi by J G Colgan

It’s 1938 and a Christmas house party is assembling near Hexham. The host is a retired colonel, Monty and among the guests are his niece along with several men she has been entangled with and their wives. Among the men are a newspaper journalist, an MP and a man injured fighting against the Fascists in Spain. At the end of a ghost story, one of the guests is dead and as they are snowed in, the house party set about investigating whether it was suicide or if there is a murderer on the loose. This is a newly written book, but with a cover designed to make you think that it is in fact a classic mystery* and it felt a bit like the author was throwing every 1930s history event that they could think of at it. It’s pretty readable as you’re going along, but I didn’t think it stuck the landing on the ending – probably because of all the plot that was going on. Definitely one where you get to the end and realise you had more problems with it than you thought! There’s promise in there, but it needed more work. Why am I including it? Well if your algorithm is anything like mine, it’s been bringing it up as a recommendation for about a month now, so i thought it was worth reporting back!

And that’s your lot – and probably my lot for Christmas reading this year. I mean until I discover a Christmas book on the to-read shelf that I just have to read right now (probably in June). Thank you for reading the blog this year – and have a great night if you’re celebrating tonight, and no matter how good or bad your 2025 has been, may your 2026 be better.

Happy New Year everyone.

*there are quite a lot of these about – Hugh Morrison is definitely doing something similar with his covers and there are some that are even more BLCC coded out there.

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: December Kindle Offers

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Happy December everyone, it’s nearly Christmas and I’m back with the last batch of Kindle offers for the year. And there are a lot of festive offerings on offer and as most people only read Christmas books in the six weeks or so around the holidays, I’m going to focus mostly on them this month.

Lets start with the Christmas books I haven’t read: the new Sarah Morgan All Together for Christmas is 99p as is Trisha Ashley’s latest The Christmas Retreat, Fallon Ballard’s All I Want is You, and the Sierra Simone and Julie Murphy novella Snow Place Like LA. Not 99p but £1.99, Sarah Morgenthaler’s The Christmas You Found Me is one of the books that I wrote while writing the post.

I started The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year last week and that’s 99p and in Kindle Unlimited. And I’ve read Christmas is All Around by Martha Walters, Jill Shalvis’s The Family You Make, A Very Merry Bromance from Lyssa Kay Adam’s Bromance Book Club series, B K Borison’s Lovelight Farms, Jasmine Guillory’s royal-adjacent romance Royal Holiday, the Agatha Christie short story anthology Midwinter Murders and M C Beaton‘s Agatha Raisin and Kissing Christmas Goodbye and A Highland Christmas which is a Hamish Macbeth and are also all 99p.

On to the non-festive stuff. One of my favourite new books of the year is 99p too – Layne Fargo’s The Favourites, just in time to fill the gap left after the Grand Prix final at the weekend and the European Championships in Sheffield in a month’s time. I also made The Rom Commers a BotW I loved Legends and Lattes when I read it earlier this year and the new book just came out, so it’s nice to see Bookshops and Bonedust on offer too. We’ve also had some teaser photos from the filming of series two of The Rivals – if you haven’t read the book yet it’s on offer as well.

If you need a curl-up-on-the-sofa-and-ignore-the-world read, The Light Years, the first Cazalet Chronicle is 99p and Helen Fielding’s ninties classic If you need a curl-up-on-the-sofa-and-ignore-the-world read, The Light Years, the first Cazalet Chronicle is 99p and Helen Fielding’s nineties classic Bridget Jones’s Diary. Both A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting and A Lady’s Guide to Scandal by Sophie Irwin are 99p, as are Cathy Yardley‘s Role Playing and Do Me a Favour both of which were Books of the Week. And if that’s still not enough for you, my Alaska read for this year’s 50 States Challenge Any Trope But You by Victoria Lavine and the first in the Ruth Galloway series The Crossing places are both 99p and the cheap Terry Pratchett this month is – unsuprisingly – Hogfather.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: November Quick Reviews

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Happy first Wednesday of the month everyone. It will be no surprise to you that two of my quick reviews this month are books that ticked off missing states in this year’s reading challenge! Without further ado, here are the reviews.

The George Eliot Murders by Edith Skom

College professor Beth Austin is off to Hawaii for a vacation during her term off teaching. At the resort on the island she takes part in a tennis tournament and comes into contact with some of the hotel’s highest spending guests. When a woman falls from a balcony, everyone thinks it’s suicide or an accident, but Beth isn’t convinced. And then another body is found and she starts investigating for real, with the help of two friends that she’s made at the resort. This is as bit of a strange one because it was first published in 1990 and is quite dated and of its time in some ways, but actually in others it feels more modern. I also didn’t think it needed the Middlemarch tie-in, but I get that that’s the conceit of the series and so it has to be there. I’m not massively familiar with Middlemarch (I think I read the book after I watched the TV adaptation in the mid 1990s!) so it also didn’t really make a huge amount of sense to me either! But I liked Beth as a character and the mystery was good with a neat conclusion. I wouldn’t rule out reading more of these, but given that I picked this up from a bookswap bookcase I suspect I won’t be come across them any time soon!

Death and the Final Cut by G M Malliet

I wanted to report back in on this one because I mentioned it when it came out earlier this month. A reminder of the plot: an actress is found dead late at night in the Round Church in Cambridge, which is being used at the set of a Viking epic movie. As St Just investigates it becomes clear that there is plenty of conflict among the cast and crew and reasons why a murder could have happened. Despite having missed three books in the series, it was pretty easy to pick up the threads of the main characters and the mystery itself is pretty good interesting and I really like the Cambridge setting. I’ve got back and bought one of the ones in the series that I’ve missed to try and fill in some gaps.

Animal Attraction by Jill Shalvis

This is the second in Shalvis’s Animal Magnetism series which is set in the town of Sunshine, Idaho. Our hero is Dell, the town’s vet and the heroine is Jade, currently working as his receptionist after having mysteriously appeared in town one day. Dell knows that Jade has a secret – she’s overqualified for the job that she’s doing and doesn’t want to let anyone into her life. Jade has always said her time in town is temporary, but as the deadline from her family to leave approaches she realises that she doesn’t want to go. Jade has some trauma in her back story which is a fairly major plot point, but it never gets as far as romantic suspense and there are plenty of cute animals and a kind and sensible hero to even that out.

And that’s your lot for this month – the other Recommendsdays in November were First in Mystery series and Dysfunctional Families and the BotWs were Murder at World’s End, Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge, Buffalo West Wing and Death in High Heels.

Happy Humpday!