Category: Recommendsday

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: July Kindle Offers

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Happy Wednesday everyone, it’s the second Wednesday of July and so it’s time for the Kindle offers post. There seems to be a bit of a dearth of 99p offers at the moment – I was hoping they were saving them for Prime day deals (that runs until Friday) but nothing much seemed to have changed when I checked back in after the deals started…

Lets start with Fiction. Cathy Yardley’s Do Me a Favour is 99p, this was a BotW basically this time last year and Yardley’s previous book Role Playing was a bonus review – that one is £1.99. And both of them are also in Kindle Unlimited. Kate Claybourn’s most recent book The Other Side of Disappearing is £2.99, but there are also £1.99 deals on a few of her earlier books too. The new Annabel Monaghan It’s a Love Story is 99p, as is Christina Lauren‘s The Soulmate Equation. The second in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Tales from the Cafe, is 99p as well.

In other stuff I’ve written about there’s the third Canon Clement mystery, Murder at the Monastery, the first Shardlake mystery Dissolution, Gabriele Gamez‘s The Next Best Thing, which as I said didn’t really work for me, but clearly has for other people. There are also quite a lot of deals on Alexis Hall books, ranging from £1.99 to £3.99 but also with quite a few of them – and others – in Kindle Unlimited. I haven’t really seen this happen before, so I’m just going to leave the list here so you can have a look and see what the options are. There’s also the fourth Robert Langdon mystery Inferno,

On the non-fiction front, Mary S Lovell’s The Mitford Girls is 99p, I assume because the TV series is out because Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love is also 99p and the complete omnibus of Jessica Fellowes’ Mitford Murders series is £3.99. There are also offers (albeit not quite as good) on a couple of Lovell’s other books, I have enjoyed The Riviera Set (it’s on my hardback non-fiction shelf in fact) and Straight on Till Morning. David Mitchelll‘s Unruly is £1.99, and Philippa Gregory‘s Normal Women is 99p.

If you’re a Pratchett reader, Mort and Eric from the Discworld series are on offer for 99p this month, as is the first in the Johnny Maxwell series for kids, Only You Can Save Mankind. The Georgette Heyer on offer is My Lord John, which is her novel set in the Wars of the Roses and is one of the few of hers that I’ve never managed to get to the end of (the other two are Simon the Coldheart and Royal Escape). The first in Simon Brett’s new series Major Brickett’s and the Circus Corpse is 99p too, I read this when it came out, and it’s not my end of the Brett oeuvre but it may work for other people better than it did to me.

In things I bought while writing the post, there’s The Last Word, which is the fourth in Elly Griffiths Harbinder Kaur series is 99p, but sadly the deal on one of the books that I bought seems to have been a really short term one – the new Emily Henry Great Big Beautiful Life was £1.99 briefly but is now back up to £9.99. It wasn’t marked as a one day only just a limited time deal but the limited time appears to have been less than three days. Sorry guys. In stuff I haven’t read yet, the latest Eloisa James, Hardly a Gentleman is 99p, as is Ali Hazelwood’s The Deep End, as is Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which has been nominated for a bunch of awards. The second in the Assistant to the Villan series, Apprentice to the Villain, is 99p. I need to try and read the first one to see if I like it before I can take advantage of this offer! Also on the pile waiting to be read is Victoria Levine’s Any Trope But You. And my willpower to resist the Alicia Thompson cover is wavering, as Never Been Shipped is also 99p!

The Formula One season is in full swing at the moment – it was the British Grand Prix just a few miles from my house (even if I wasn’t in it at the time) last weekend and there are are a few motorsport romances on offer: there’s the second in Simone Soltani’s Lights Out F1 driver romance series, this one is called Ride With Me – I still have the first one Cross the Line waiting on the pile to be read. There’s also Slipstream by Madge Maril and Racing into Love by Laney Kate at 99p, and Pole Position by Rebecca J Caffrey and Offtrack by Esha Patel at £1.99 ( Esha Patel’s Overdrive is £2.99 as well).

And that’s your lot for today – Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June Quick Reviews

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It’s July so I’m back with the quick reviews from last month.

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

I love the way that Barbara Pym looks at slices of normal (or normal-ish) women’s lives and relationships in ways that are witty and also sad. Leonora is a middle-aged woman who is attractive and knows it. She’s got a collection of male admirers, but her latest are an antiques dealer and his nephew. She prefers the nephew, James, although the uncle (Humphrey) is more “suitable” and plays the two of them off against each other, whilst trying to detach James from his other relationships. It’s darker than some of Pym’s earlier novels, but it’s very good.

Copper Script by K J Charles

The new book from K J Charles has Aaron, a Met Police Sergeant, who is trying to figure out how Graphologist Joel is able to tell people’s lives and personalities from their handwriting. Aaron is convinced it’s a con, but Joel’s skills are very real. And soon the two of them are trying to solve some crime. I read this in single day and enjoyed it a lot. If you like K J Charles, this will probably work for you.

The Chow Maniac by Vivian Chien

I read the first two in this series a few years back (I bought the first one back when I was in Washington) and spotted this eleventh and most recent in the series in Foyles last week so took the opportunity to check in again as they’re quite hard to get hold of over here. And Lana’s life has moved on quite a bit – she’s still got the boyfriend but she’s much more established in her sleuthing. This sees her investigating whether a series of deaths among the Asian community in Cleveland might actually be murder, and connected to a secret society. Lana is still verging on too stupid to life, but I enjoyed reading it.

And that’s your lot this month

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Mitford-related books

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I’m trying to be timely this week – there’s a drama series about to start about the Mitford sisters, so I’ve been back through my reading lists to come up with some ideas for anyone who watches the series and wants to know more!

So lets start off with Nancy Mitford’s own The Pursuit of Love. The Radletts are based on Nancy’s own family and you follow them through their adventures and love affairs in the years between the Wars. It’s a funny and smart social satire and I raced through this when I first read it, and went straight on to Love in a Cold Climate. Nancy was one of the Bright Young Things after she made her society debut and her writing (like her friend Evelyn Waugh’s) is full of real people and incidents that she has fictionalised – some times very, very lightly.

Jessica Mitford also wrote her own memoir of the family – Hons and Rebels. Now if you watched the trailer for outrageous above, you may have noticed that there was a lot of competing politics going on among the siblings. And Decca was the communist (as opposed to Diana who was the Fascist) and so her memoir is very much coming at it all from the perspective of someone who disagrees with the aristocracy and privilege that her family had. She’s not as witty as Nancy, but she’s also maybe not as mean as Nancy could be.

Cover of The Mitford Girls

I read Harold Acton’s biography of Nancy years ago, but I have never got around to Mary Lovell’s Mitford Girls even though I’ve got her Riviera Set on the keepers shelf. So I’m going to take this as a cue that it’s time to finally get around to that, and borrow mum’s copy and read it! But I have read D J Taylor’s Bright Young Things, which covers several of the sisters as it surveys the hedonistic generation of party goers who it has to be said were mostly Not Great People.

Talking of Not Great People, I should add that I have read one of Diana’s books – her biography of the Duchess of Windsor and I do not recommend. Diana was in the Duchess’s social circle and the final line of my good reads review is “Worth reading if only as a lesson to retain your critical faculties when you read any non fiction book to remind yourself what the author’s objectives may be.” Which is to say that it was even more biased than I was expecting it to be, and I was expecting it to be really quite biased. Nany however was actually a good biographer – and her book about Madame De Pompadour is actually pretty good.

If 1920s/1930s society is your sort of wheelhouse, you might also want to check out my Happy Valley Set and non-fiction Rich People Problems recommendsdays and if you’ve got any recommendations for me, please do put them in the comments.

Happy Reading!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June Kindle Offers

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We are in the sixth month of the year, so this month I have leant into the holiday books end of the kindle offers. I was going to say that for me holiday books are romantic fiction and light crime, but that’s a lot of what I read when I’m not on holiday too. But for the purpose of buying in advance, that’s what I’m after. I’ll do you a post in a few weeks of what I’m looking to buy at the airport this year, because those are slightly different things! Anyway, to the offers.

Last year’s Emily Henry Funny Story is 99p, as is this year’s Mhairi McPharlane Cover Story, which I haven’t read yet but which sounds a lot of fun (people who can’t stand each other forced to pretend they’re in a fake relationship to save an undercover investigation). Christina Laurens’ The Paradise Problem is also 99p – I loved this when I read it earlier this year. There’s also Victoria Hislop’s The Island, which I read years ago and enjoyed, and Sarah Adams’s When In Rome about a burnt out popstar in a small town, which was once of the first of the crop of Taylor Swift-inflected romances I read. And the new Rachel Lynn Solomon What Happens in Amsterdam is 99p too (I bought it while writing this!)

If you’re a bit higher brow than me for your sun lounger books, then Tracy Chevalier’s The Glass Maker is 99p – I have this waiting to be read on the Kindle but just haven’t got to it yet because I’m still in that world of wanting to know going in that I’m going to get a resolution, preferably happy at the end of books. If you want some Romantasy, then Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart is 99p – this is the first in a completed trilogy so you can read straight through to the end if you like it or there is Rebecca Ross’s Divine Rivals, which is the first of two – and it should be noted that I haven’t read any of these!

Moving on to the regular author check in: we’re still in a world of the Georgette Heyer murder mysteries being the ones on offer – this time it’s Footsteps in the Dark, the Discworld offer this month is Equal Rites and Borrower of the Night, the first in Elizabeth Peters’s Vicky Bliss series is 99p too.

And that’s your lot this month – enjoy!

Recommendsday

Reccommendsday: June Quick Reviews

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Lets be honest, in a month that was dominated by my massive re-read binge through the Mitchell and Markby series I’m surprised and pleased that there was enough other stuff on the reading list that I had books for a quick reviews post at all, considering at times I was having to force myself to stop reading about Meredith and Alan in order to have something for Book of the Week! And yet here we are. I did it.

Curtain Call to Murder by Julian Clary

Julian Clary’s new murder mystery centres on a death that happens on stage during a performance the first night of a new play at the London Palladium. We know from the start about the murder – but the first half of the book follows the show on it’s initial provincial tour so you can see the dynamics and the tensions building before the fatal moment. Our main character is Jayne, a dresser for the show, but Julian has written a version of himself into the show as a friend of hers – and the show is told in extracts from Jane’s diary, commentary from Julian, snippets from a WhatsApp group with the actors, posts from a theatre blog, newspaper headlines, police interviews etc. I saw a couple of the twists coming – but I think you were meant to because Jayne is quite a naive character in some ways and she balances out the cynicism and bitchiness of Julian’s commentary!

Death at the Playhouses by Stuart Douglas

This is the second in the Lowe and Le Breton series – I read the first at the back end of last year and made it a BotW so I thought I’d report back in on the follow up as well. This sees Edward and John accepting roles in a regional production of Shakespeare during the gap between filming of their sitcom. But when the actor that John replaced turns up dead, they find themselves caught up in another murder investigation, this time with links to John’s past. This is fun – but it’s a bit over long and there’s one big continuity mistake (or at least confusion in the chronology) that really lifted me out of the story. But I continue to like the characters and will happily read a third in the series should it materialise.

The Beast of Littleton Woods by T E Kinsey

Astonishingly we have reached the twelfth in the Edwardian mystery series set in a very murderous patch of Gloucestershire. This time Lady Hardcastle and Florence are investigating rumours of a panther stalking the neighbourhood after a sheep is mauled to death. They’re convinced that there must be a rational explanation – but then a local man is seemingly torn to shreds and the villagers start to get really scared. Can they figure out what is going on before someone else dies? As is sometimes the case with these, I had the solution figured out relatively early, but I don’t really mind because I like the characters and the setting so much. This has got plenty of action with the village in it as well as a bit of a knowing wink going on about the death rate in Littleton Cotterell too which is a nice touch. While these continue to be in Kindle Unlimited (and I have a subscription) I will continue to read them!

And that’s your lot this month – a reminder that the Books of the Week in May were Tea on Sunday, Underscore, A Farewell to Yarns and On Turpentine Lane and the recommendsdays were Brighton-set books and Struggling Wives.

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Struggling Wives

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Happy Wednesday everyone, and yes, this is the second Recommensday inspired by reading At Mrs Lippencote’s! The first one back at Easter was about unhappy marriages, and this one is about Struggling Wives of various types.

Paperback copy of At Mrs Lippencote's

Julia in At Mrs Lippencote’s is the wife of an RAF officer who finds the social expectations of her frustrating and can’t ever quite get to grips with what she ought to be doing and what she wants to do. In Mrs Tim of the Regiment – Hester is also a military wife, but she’s not struggling with her relationship with her husband like Julia is – it’s everything else that’s causing her headaches. Her husband is away, and she’s been moved to a new area and has a lot on her plate: a new group to fit into, a friend with a romantic entanglement and some one chasing after her too. This is written as a diary and part of the fun of it is Hester’s obliviousness to the various men who are sniffing around her. In The Diary of a Provincial Lady, our heroine is also struggling – but in her case it’s mostly to keep the house from falling into chaos whilst also trying to keep up appearances in the neighbourhood. This is not the first time I have recommended this and I continue to love it and empathise with an inability to plant bulbs when you’re meant to!

In Marghanita Laski’s To Bed With Grand Music, Deborah is struggling in a different way: to be faithful to her husband who has left for Egypt (why always Egypt?) and who she promises to be faithful to despite the fact that he says he can’t promise to be. She up sticks for London, abandoning her son and takes lover after lover. Deborah is an awful person – and a terrible failure as a wife and mother – but it makes for great reading. and finally In Guard Your Daughters the daughters are the centre of the plot but their mother is absolutely a struggling wife. She’s not living in the real world or actually participating in the household and you could say it’s the root of all the problems in that household.

I have plenty of books that suggest they might be in a similar vein on the shelf to be read: like Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins, An Academic Question by Barbara Pym and Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple, so there may yet be a follow up-follow up post!

Happy Humpday!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: May Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month and time for kindle offers again. And I have to say that it’s a really good crop this month with lots of books I’ve talked about on offer and a few things that I would like to read too.

Let’s start with an incredibly recent BotW which is 99p – Legends and Lattes. It feels like every month at the moment there is a great Christina Lauren on offer – this month it’s The Unhoneymooners which was a BotW back in 2019. There’s also an older Katie Fforde on offer – Restoring Grace – which features a house in need of restoration (which I love as a trope) and a pregnancy (which I don’t). Previous BotW Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, Daisy Jones and the Six is back on offer – which reminds me that a) I still haven’t watched the TV series and b) it’s not long until Taylor Jenkins Reid‘s new novel is out (yes, I have it preordered).

There’s another very recent BotW which is on offer, but this time for £1.99 – it’s A Case of Mice and Murder. I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this – and it’s sequel which isn’t out until July, but I have read already thanks to NetGalley. Former BotW The Potting Shed Murders is 99p ahead of the sequel coming out in July. Chris Brookmyre‘s The Cracked Mirror is also on offer.

Tales from The Folly aka the Rivers of London Short Story collection has a new (or at least tweaked) cover and is 99p – a reminder that with this one some of the stories had already appeared elsewhere and that also you need to have read the books for any of this to really make sense for you. Book six in the Brighton series was in the latest Books Incoming at the weekend but book one, The Zig Zag Girl is on offer – 99p or in Kindle Unlimited. Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky is 99p and one of my all time favourites, Making Money is £1.99

In mystery books that I haven’t read (yet), Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping and Georgette Heyer’s Duplicate Death is 99p and there’s also an Andrew Taylor book that’s not in his Restoration series, but set in the late eighteenth century – The Anatomy of Ghosts is set at a Cambridge College which is being haunted by a murdered woman. If you are an Alexander McCall Smith reader there are two on offer – The Enigma of the Garlic, which is the sixteenth 44 Scotland Street book and The Great Hippopotamus Hotel in the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency one.

In romance novels I haven’t read, Remember When, the latest Mary Balogh – number four in the Ravenwood series – is 99p, Harriet Evans’s The Wildflowers, which centres around the daughter of a pair of actors, likened to Burton and Taylor. I mentioned Maeve Binchy in a Recommendsday a month or so back and her Nights of Rain and Stars is on offer

And finally in non-fiction, Going Infinite was a BotW in the autumn and Michael Lewis’s original book Liar’s Poker – about Wall Street greed in the 1980s is 99p. Also about the 1980s, Going to War is about football fans in that decade – with tragedy, recession and hooliganism all making their mark on the game. There are a couple of royal-related books on offer – Valentine Lowe’s Courtiers about how the modern royal family operates and Nigel Cawthorne’s The War of the Windsors about the relationship between King Charles and Prince Andrew, while Robert Lacey’s The Battle of the Brothers isn’t on offer, but is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment.

Have fun, don’t spend too much!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: April Quick Reviews

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It’s a murder mystery special for this month’s Quick Reviews. I didn’t mean it to turn out that way, but it just did and maybe given how many mystery books I’m reading at the moment that shouldn’t be a surprise! Anyway, here are three books (one of which I’ll admit I finished in May although I started it in April) that I read last month that I haven’t already told you about.

Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective by Kelly Gardiner and Sharmini Kumar*

This is a murder mystery set two years after the end of Pride and Prejudice, where Caroline Bingley gets drawn into investigating a murder after Georgiana Darcy’s maid goes missing. Soon the two women are in London investigating where they find a body and then come up against magistrates, distinctly unsavoury people and the East India Company to try and find out what happened. I thought the murder mystery in this was good – I particularly liked the way the East India Company and their activities were used in it – but I wasn’t convinced about the Pride and Prejudice side of things. There’s lots of P&P related spin-offs out there – I’ve read a load of them myself – but I’m not sure this delivered either of the things that people come to them for – which is Austen-like wit and writing or more of the characters you loved from the book. I think this would have been as good a mystery and maybe even a better book – if it wasn’t hung off Austen’s characters.

Murder on Line One by Jeremy Vine*

Edward Temmis has just lost his job presenting on at a local radio station. He’s still recovering from a tragedy in his personal life and this leaves him somewhat adrift. Then the granddaughter of one of his former listeners asks for his help investigate the death of her grandmother. But as they investigate, he discovers that more than one of his listeners may have been targeted. This is the first murder mystery from radio and TV presenter Jeremy Vine. And given that I used to work in a local radio station this was totally intriguing to me. But perhaps the fact that I used to work in local radio was the reason that I didn’t quite click with this – because this is the best staffed commercial radio station that I’ve ever come across (and yet with no mention of sales staff!) and it just kept lifting me out of the story and making it harder to get lost in the story. Add to that I found quite a lot of the characters quite hard to like and that I had the culprit figured out pretty early on and it just didn’t work for me as well as I had hoped. But that’s fine and it may well work better for other people who don’t have the background that I do – or who don’t read as many murder mysteries as I do!

Murder will Out by Alison Joseph

I mentioned in the Recommendsday a couple of weeks ago that I thought there was an Agatha Christie-solves-crimes series, so as I managed to find one of them and read it and I thought I ought to report back! This is set in 1923, during Agatha Christie’s first marriage to Archie. She’s busy writing her next novel when there’s an actual murder in the village that she lives in and her neighbour is determined that Agatha is the perfect person to help solve it (and exonerate the neighbour’s godson). This is a bit too long to be a novella, but it’s not really proper novel length either. I think it’s probably got too much plot for the length that it actually is – but it’s quite hard to find the balance of enough plot to keep the reader guessing but not so much that it’s confusing for the reader. And a bit like the Caroline Bingley novel above, I’m not sure why it needed to be hung off Agatha Christie, because it didn’t feel that specific to Christie as a character – it could have been a fictional mystery writer getting dragged into a local murder.

And that’s your lot this month – a quick reminder that as well as the Real People Detective fiction Recommendsday, I also gave you some Conclave-y recommendations and some Unhappy Marriage fiction. The Books of the Week were Legends and Lattes, A Case of Mice and Murder, The Edinburgh Murders and The Rest of Our Lives.

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Habemus Papam

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It’s Wednesday, and as we have a Papal conclave starting next week, I’m bringing you a Recommendsday themed around the Vatican City and or the Catholic Church. You’re welcome.

Of course one of the big movies of Oscar season was Conclave, which is based on a book of the same name by Robert Harris. So you could read that or if you haven’t already seen the film, now might be the perfect time! But before Conclave, if you’d asked me to think of a book that’s set around the Vatican I would have said Angels and Demons, which is the first book in Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series. This has the Illuminati and a bomb in the Holy See on the eve of Conclave. This was the third Dan Brown I read, 20 or so years ago and I had started to spot his tropes and patterns by that point, but there’s a reason he’s sold so many books – he’s very easy to read, particularly if you’re not a big reader. There’s a sixth book coming in the autumn – and all of the others have also had strong links to religion in some way. I still think the Da Vinci Code is probably the best of them though.

After not having thought about these books for probably actual years, I’m now mentioning Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde myseries twice in just a couple of weeks – as book five in that series The Vatican Murders (if you’re buying on Kindle) or Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (if you’re buying in paperback) sees Wilde and Conan Doyle in the Holy See in the aftermath of the death of Pope Pius IX – my review from all the way back in 2016 (!) says it’s a bit like a Victorian Da Vinci Code, so it would seem like a really apt choice for this post!

Not set in the Vatican, but very much about the Catholic Church is Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose. I mentioned this last year in my post of books set in Italy, but it also fits here. Like The Da Vinci Code, it’s one of the best selling books ever published – with about 50 million copies worldwide compared to 80 million for the Da Vinci Code – but people are a lot less sniffy about this one than they are about Robert Langdon. As I’ve said before I read it as part of my history degree because of all the research and detail that Eco put into this, and its set in the fourteen century during the Avignon Papacy. Fun fact: there hasn’t been a French Pope since all of that went down, which didn’t stop the French media from really, really hoping the new Pope would be French during their coverage of the Conclave after the death of Pope John Paul II, which happened while I was living in France. Ahem. Anyway, back to In the Name of the Rose: this has got lots to unpick in it – from the Sherlock Holmesian hero – William of Baskerville – to spotting the deliberate anacronisms and errors and working out why they’re there. There was a TV adaptation five or so years ago (which I found way more gruesome than the book) which was an Italian and German co-production but also featured Rupert Everett in the cast. It was shown on BBC Two (that’s how I watched it) and I enjoyed it but thought some of the dubbing was clunky as well as the simplification of the plot but it’s very expensively done (and they spent the money better than Disney+ did on the Shardlake adaptation) – it’s still available to rent from Amazon should the mood take you.

On my to read list in this sort of area is Katte Mosse’s Labyrinth which has got an archaeological mystery set around some bodies discovered near Carcassone and a crusade 800 years earlier. To be honest the only reason I haven’t read this yet is because it is absolutely huge and my record with very long books right now is not great. I’m pretty sure I’ve got some Medici fiction somewhere on my shelves too – but I can’t remember if it’s Papal-Medici or other Medici doing things around Florence! And I’m also pretty sure I’ve got some Father Brown on my shelves somewhere too.

But what I’m actually doing at the moment is listening to Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, which is his satire on religion and philosophy and the role of religion in politics. It would have been Sir Terry’s birthday this week and it’s been ages since I read this – and the shiny new recording has Andy Serkis narrating it which is a lot of fun. And in a weird quirk of fate, I’ve just had an email saying it’s actually the Audible Daily Deal today (Wednesday) so if you don’t already own it, now is your chance…

Happy Humpday everyone.

detective, mystery, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Real People Detective Fiction

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So I said yesterday that I had plans for some of the other books that I read last week – and one of them inspired this post. So here I am delivering on my promise that you’d hear more about some of last week’s reading and not just the BotW! This post is about mystery books that feature real people as the detectives.

So lets start with the book that inspired this: The Mystery at Rake Hall by Maureen Paton. This new mystery novel came out earlier this month (I got my copy via NetGalley) and is set in post-war Oxford and features C S Lewis – known as Jack – getting drawn into a mystery after one of his brightest pupils stops coming to her tutorials. Susan it turns out is at Rake Hall, a seemingly respectable hostel for unmarried mothers. But there’s more to it than meets the eye and along with Lucy, one of Susan’s friends and the daughter of a college servant, Jack starts to investigate. I don’t know a lot about the real C S Lewis, but this is a good mystery in a great setting. I love Gaudy Night, and that world of scouts and bulldogs is very much still in evidence here a decade or more after Sayers’ novel – and Sayers herself makes an appearance here too.

From one golden age author to another – and Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey series. I’ve written about these before, but they’re probably the most well known of the fictionalised real person solves crimes books. Because of the circles that Tey moved in, this also features people like Alfred Hitchcock and Daphne Du Maurier in the stories as Upson weaves the mysteries around the real events of Tey’s life. There are eleven books in the series, and I don’t remember feeling like it was all wrapped up when I finished Shot With Crimson – but that came out in 2023 and there hasn’t been another yet. And although Upson has a new book listed on Amazon, it seems to be a standalone Christmas mystery set in 1943 (which I will definitely be looking out for) rather than another Tey novel but details are sketchy so we will see. Margery Allingham makes an appearance in one of the Upson novels – and I’m pretty sure there’s a mystery series featuring Agatha Christie doing the detecting as well, so only Ngaio Marsh to go to complete the set of Queens of Crime!

It’s been a few years since I read them, but there is also Gyles Brandreth’s series of Oscar Wilde murder mysteries which also feature Arthur Conan Doyle and Wordsworth’s great grandson Robert Sherard. There are seven in this series, and I’ve read the first three and book five (I used to get them from the library, but my local library closed down for: reasons and I’ve not been a library regular since) but they’re clever mysteries with a dash of wit – although obviously you are heading towards Wilde’s eventual imprisonment (which is part of book six) and some of the foreshadowing of that can be a bit… clunky. But if you see them around, they’re worth a look.

And finally a slightly tangential one – and one where I’ve only read two of them. Jessica Fellowes’s Mitford Murder mysteries. I say they’re tangential because they’re set in the Mitford household, but its one of the staff who is doing the actual mystery solving. Louisa is nursery maid to the younger children and chaperone to the older ones (at least to start with), and this means that she has a ringside seat to the events of the Mitford sisters’ eventful lives. I will say that I thought the first one didn’t quite live up to the promise that it had in the blurb, and the second one had more of the stuff that I didn’t like about them and so I haven’t read any more of them – but the fact that they got to six in the series and I see various of them in paperback in the crime sections of the big bookshops fairly regularly suggests that other people liked them more than me!

That’s your lot for this week – hopefully there’s something here for you – but also, don’t forget I’ve got a whole post about Novelised Real People (in books that aren’t mysteries) from back in 2021.

Have a great Wednesday!