Category: Recommendsday

book round-ups, Recommendsday, series

Recommendsday: First in series…

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Happy Wednesday everyone, this week I’ve got a mixed bag of first books in series that I have recently read – we’ve got one fantasy, one historical mystery and one cozy crime, which may not be entirely representative of my general reading over the year, but is actually fairly representative of where my reading is at at the moment, minus a romance but I’m mostly reading standalone romances rather than series at the moment so I didn’t have one I could include!

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

After having enjoyed Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter so much last month, I went out and bought the first in Heather Fawcett’s previous series (yes I know, I’m repeating an author, but hey I make and break my own rules) about a professor who studies faeries and folklore. Emily Wilde has gone to visit a village in the far north to study the Hidden Ones, their local fae. She doesn’t want to talk to the locals and she is less than pleased when one of her colleagues from Cambridge turns up to help her. I really loved the world building and the characters are great. I felt like Fawcett did a really good job of explaining how the world works without info dumping on you and the two main plot strands – what are the fairies up to and who is Wendell Bartlett – provided plenty of action without being too stressful. Cozy fantasy so good I have already acquired the rest of the trilogy…

Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claud Izner

This is the first in a series of books featuring bookseller Victor Legris in late nineteenth century Paris. In this it’s 1889 and Paris is a buzz with the World Exposition. Victor witnesses a woman’s death on the viewing platform of the brand new Eiffel Tower and doesn’t think that the official explanation is the right one. Soon he’s ducking and weaving around Paris trying to work out what happened and who did it and more people start to die. The original French version of this won the Prix Michel-Lebrun in 2003, which is a prize for French crime novels, which I thought was a good sign, but I was obviously reading it in English and although the mystery is good I found the writing style quite hard going, but that could of course be the fault of the translator. I bought this on my trip to Paris about 18 months ago so it’s taken me a while to get to and I do have the second on the shelf already ahving spotted it cheap second hand. So I’ll give that a go at some point and see if it grows on me.

Jammed with Secrets by Selina Hill*

This is the first in a new series of small town cozy crimes and sees Sadie, a disgraced chef return to her home town to try and rebuild her life. She’s trying to do this by running food trailers at a local music festival when a member of a 90s boyband is found dead in one of them. Not satisfied with the police investigation, Sadie starts to investigate herself to try and save her business. The actual murder mystery plot was pretty good – but the problem here is Sadie. There are some issues with her backstory that make it hard for the reader to sympathise with her and entirely understandable why the people in town wouldn’t want to eat her food. This is a problem entirely of the author’s own creation – and made me wonder why it wasn’t set up differently. And that’s all I can say without spoilers, but this is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment if you want to go and find out what I’m talking about!

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: The Tower of London in books

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Happy Wednesday everyone. Having recently read a mystery that was set in and around the Tower of London – and walking past it on my way to the theatre, it got me thinking about books that I’ve read set there. And so here I am with a very mixed bag Recommendsday for you.

Now obviously there are any number of history books that feature the tower given that it was the major seat of power and royal residence from the eleventh to about the fifteenth century and then less a residence more a prison from the Tudors onwards. So you can basically pick a history book about a major figure in English history and the Tower will feature in it. I’m not good with recommendations for history pre-Tudors, but I have read two of Dan Jones three books of medieval history (The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses, also known as The Hollow Crown) and I have the third one (Henry V) ready to go on the Kindle. And if you want to read Tudor history, the David Starkey books are an accessible place to start.

And as you know there is a lot of fiction written in and around the Tudors – I’ve written about Philippa Gregory’s series before, but there is also the Shardlake series where the Tower pops up, and obviously Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – which I’ve read two of but can’t bring myself to read the end of because I know how it ends for Cromwell and Mantel has done such a good job of making you like him!

If you only know one thing about the Tower of London, it may be the story of the Princes in the Tower, aka Edward V and his younger brother Richard, who disappeared after being put into the Tower by their uncle and guardian the Duke of Gloucester, who then turned himself in to Richard III. What actually happened to them is one of the big debates in history and so crops up in a lot of fiction. The most famous is probably Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, where her series detective Alan Grant is ill in hospital and uses the time to try and solve the mystery himself. It regularly crops up in lists of best mystery books ever. The Chronicles of St Mary’s series also hits up this time period in Plan for the Worst, but given that this is book 11 in a quite complicated series, I wouldn’t advise starting your St Mary’s journey there.

Now one series you can pick up midway through without being completely lost are the Daisy Dalrymple books by Carola Dunn. Book 16, The Bloody Tower, sees new mum Daisy picking up the threads of her journalistic career by writing an article about the Tower of London. It sees her spending a night there so that she can witness the ceremony of the keys – and then stumbling across a dead body the next morning. I think this was the first novel I read with the tower in it – and it’s got a lot about the day to day of the Tower in the 1920s in it as well as the murder mystery.

And then that brings me up to the book that got me thinking about writing this post – Murder at the Tower by N R Daws. Mrs Bramble is a palace housekeeper at Hampton Court, but when her friend Reverend Weaver is accused of a murder at the Tower of London after a congregant drops dead during a service, she heads there to help clear his name. At the Tower she finds secrets and feuds and a long list of suspects. And a long list of suspects is the thing that I think caused me the most issues with this – the huge cast of characters meant it was hard to follow who was who. I also didn’t love the writing style which just added up to a bit of a disappointing read for me overall. This came out earlier this month and I requested this from NetGalley because I really like a historical mystery – and I wanted to see whether being in conjunction with Historic Royal Palaces made for any different details than other mysteries that I have read that are set in and around the Tower of London. I didn’t realise this was the second book featuring the same characters or I might have thought twice because I do like to read in order.

And that’s your lot today – Happy Humpday!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: March 2026 Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of March and so I’m back with some Kindle offers. There’s a big old Kindle Sale going on at the moment which means that there was a lot to chose from and also that it was a relatively expensive post to write – so I hope you appreciate it!

Cover of And the Crowd Went Wild

The first one is a new release from last month and one that I already told you that I was excited about: the new Chicago Stars book from Susan Elizabeth Philips, And the Crowd Went Wild is 99p and I clicked on it just as fast as I could and as you know I have already finished it! Also from the very recent releases (which I also haven’t read) is And Now, Back to You by B K Borison, the second book in their Heartstrings series, which features competing meteorologists and the storm of the century. Former BotW and 2024 Emily Henry release Funny Story is 99p as is Christina Lauren‘s The Paradise Problem, Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date from Ashley Herring Blake‘s Bright Falls series, Casey McQuiston’s Red, White and Royal Blue and one of the books I mentioned in last week’s Quick Reviews, The Fundamentals of Being Good Girl.

Moving on to mysteries, Jeremy Vine’s Murder on Line One is on offer too which I’m assuming is because the sequel comes out in late April. Elly Griffiths‘ first Brighton Mystery, The Zig Zag Girl, is 99p as is Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Sutanto (which is also in Kindle Unlimited), The Witness at the Wedding (the sixth Fetherings book), The Marlow Murder Club and Death Comes to Marlow (that’s the first two in that series), the second Canon Clement A Death in the Parish and the first Dahlia mystery The Three Dahlias,

Just a couple of non fiction books to mention: Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died is 99p, as is comedian Adrian Edmondson’s memoir Beserker! and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. It’s not on offer on price, but Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe‘s Vanderbilt is is currently in Kindle Unlimited. And Laurence Rees’s The Nazi Mind is £1.99

Still on the shelf waiting to be read are Gill Hornby’s The Elopement, Maz Evans’s Over My Dead Body which are all 99p this month. I still haven’t read the first Castle Knoll Files book but the second, How To Seal Your Own Fate, is 99p because the third is out next month too. We have to wait until the middle of May for the second series of Rivals, but if you’re bored of waiting, the fitfth in the Rutshire series Appassionata is 99p this month.

Rebecca Yaros’s The Fourth Wing is on offer again – I still haven’t read this, and the to read pile is so huge I’m residting the urge to buy it because it will be literal years before I get around to reading it, but it has been incredibly popular and well reviewed obviously so is a good deal. In other things that I haven’t read (although to be fair I did try and read this one but gave up!) is Outlander, the first in Diana Gabaldon’s series of the same name which is a very successful TV series too. Catch Her If You Can, he latest Tessa Bailey is 99p too – I’ve decided (after reading three of hers and giving up on a fourth) that Bailey is not my thing, but she’s tremendously popular which is why I came back and tried again (and again) after disliking the first one of hers that I read.

And finally, there are two Terry Pratchett’s on offer: Men at Arms so you could start the City Watch series and Tales of Wizards and Dragons which is a short story collection for young readers and ne of my favourites, Regency Buck, is the Heyer on offer.

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: February 2026 Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it is time for the Quick Reviews, which this month has turned out to be a reporting back in special – with reviews of three books that I mentioned when they were released and which I’ve now read. You’re welcome.

The Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone*

Cover of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl

As I said on release day this is set in a college town and features a new arrival to the the town who takes on a nannying job alongside her work at the college only to discover that her new boss is the guy she had a one night stand with on her first night in town. Once again with these two authors’ joint works, I like the premise and some of the execution but not all of it. It’s got fun banter, it navigated the power dynamic issues of boss-nanny really well (much better than I expected) but I found the plot strand about Maddie’s longer term career aspirations frustrating and I thought it was one plot strand too many. Also this had a couple of my personal bug bear words during sex scenes (please, no seeping) which was annoying.

Night Rider by Sloane Fletcher*

Cover of Night Rider

Now I had my doubts about the signals the cover was sending when I wrote my preview post for this and I was right: this has got the wrong cover. Because this is definitely a romantic suspense and the cover doesn’t really indicate that. It’s in the blurb to some extent, but this is a much darker read than a pink and lilac cover would have you think. There are various points of not insignificant peril and a heroine who is suffering the after effects of trauma. There is a lot of cowboy ranch action here, but it is broken up by the darkness and peril. There is possibly a bit too much plot going on here too and I felt like it left the readers hanging a bit as well – it felt like there should have been an epilogue to wrap up one key plot strand completely – or a preview explaining that it would be tied up in the next book in the series. Sorry if that doesn’t make sense, but any more would be a spoiler.

Missing in Soho by Holly Stars*

Cover of Missing in Soho

This is the second book featuring the drag queen and sometime detective Misty Divine. Now as I said in the preview, I was coming back to see how the huge hanging thread from the first book was resolved. And the good news is that that thread was resolved in this one (more or less) but some of the things that I didn’t love in the first book were even more prominent in this one. Misty/Joe in that first story was a bit too-stupid-to-live and foolhardy at times in that – but this one it felt like their behaviour has properly crossed over into selfishness – which is what a lot of the other characters were accusing them of. I did understand Misty/Joe’s motivations but it made them a very hard character to like – and I think the whole point is that you’re meant to be rooting for them. Other people may not have that issue or be bothered by it in the same way that I was though. The end of the book teases a third in the series, but I’m not sure I’ll be reading it.

And that’s your lot for this month, a reminder of the other two Recommensday posts from February – Sports books and Edwardian mysteries, and the books of the week which were Future Saints, Cyanide in the Sun, Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter and Hattie Brings Down the House.

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Edwardian-set mysteries

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The tenth Veronica Speedwell mystery comes out on Tuesday next week and so I thought I’d mark it with a post about other Edwardian-set mysteries. The first decade or so of the twentieth century isn’t as popular with authors as the period between the two wars and while nothing is quite like Veronica – in terms of the humour of Deanna Raybourn’s writing mostly – there are still a fair few books for those who want them.

Hardback

The most obvious books for me to mention here are the two Gabriel Ward books which made my best books of the year posts for 2025. There is a third book coming apparently, but I’m/we’re going to have to wait a while for that – although it’s up for pre-order (and believe me I have pre-ordered it) it doesn’t have a title yet and the release date is currently late January 2027.

M C Beaton was a prolific writer under many pseudonyms and one of her lesser known series (from the pre-Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raison era) are the Harry Cartwright books, which Goodreads helpfully calls “Edwardian Mystery series”. Harry is a Boer War veteran who now helps society fix or solve difficult situations. There are four books in the series and like a lot of Beaton’s books if you read them too close together you begin to spot the formula a bit too much for comfort, but if you space them out more they’re much more fun.

I’ve only just finished The Housekeepers by Alex Hay* but I wanted to throw it in because it’s sort of tangentially related even though it’s not a mystery story per se. This is a heist story set in 1905 when Mrs King has just been dismissed from her position as housekeeper at a grand mansion in Mayfair. She decides to take her revenge, and because of her background in a shady world of con artists and thieves, she’s got the connections to do it. So she gathers a group of women around her to help her carry out an audacious plan to rob the house of all its contents during a costume ball. But as they work to carry out their plan, they discover that the house may be hiding even more secrets than they thought. This was a bit slower paced than I liked, and the comeuppance at the end happened pretty quickly, but I do like a story set in a big house – and the upstairs downstairs of this was good too. I’ve had this on the pile for ages – so long in fact that Hay’s third book is out later this year and I have been picking up the second (another crime caper) and being tempted by it only to remember that I hadn’t read the one I already had!

Lets end with the series that I’ve already written about – there’s the Lady Hardcastle books by T E Kinsey about the widow of a diplomat who makes her home in the Costwolds with her faithful maid and keeps stumbling across mysteries. Then there’s Edward Marston’s Ocean Liner series about George Porter Dillman and Genevieve Mansfield, who meet in the first book when they are on board the same ship and it all goes from there. And if you read middle grade or young adult books, there are the two connected Katherine Woodfine series – the Sinclair Mysteries and the Taylor and Rose mysteries

Happy Humpday!

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!