Category: Recommendsday

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: July Quick Reviews

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A slight theme to the post this month – everything is a mystery, two of them are first in series and the other is the first book I’ve read by the author. And yes, I finished this first one after last weeks’ BLCC roundup had gone up or it might have gone in that instead and reduced the amount of Lorac/Carnac books in that one!

Scandalize My Name by Fiona Sinclair

This is one of the more recent BLCC releases (it came out in April) and is one from a much lesser known author who, based on this, really deserves rediscovery. The murder happens at a house in North London that has been divided into flats. While the residents and neighbours are assembling for a 21st birthday party, one of the residents has been killed in the basement. There is no shortage of people who might have wanted the victim dead, and Superintendent Grainger has a tight group of suspects all of whom had motive and opportunity. Sinclair introduces a lot of characters in a hurry at the start of this which might put you off initially, but stick with it and it’s a good and clever read. I skipped back and read the first chapter again after I had read the solution and spotted a few really neat details hidden in plain sight, although it doesn’t really gives you all the clues to be able to solve it yourself.

Six Sweets Under by Sarah Fox

This is a cozy crime novel set in a fictional town in Vermont which is filled with canals and small businesses. Our detective is Becca, a former actress who has moved back to her home town after a spell in Hollywood. She’s taking over her grandparents’ chocolate shop and settling back into small town life when a local man is found dead after having been seen arguing with her grandfather, who becomes one of the main suspects. So, because this is cozy crime, Becca sets out to clear him. This has an interesting setting – lots of canals, lots of boats – but I found the heroine a bit irritating (for example she’s afraid of deep water because her brother told her there was a monster living in it) and the characters didn’t feel as well developed as I would have liked. I picked this up from the cozy crime section in Waterstone’s Piccadilly back in the autumn and I can see that there are two more in the series – but the second of those appears to have changed publishers so I suspect that there will be no more. I enjoyed it enough that I’m not ruling out getting one of the others to help me out with Vermont if I do the 50 States challenge again in 2026.

Flipped for Murder by Maddie Day

This is another first in series, another cozy crime and another of the harder to get states for the 50 states challenge. This time we’re in Indiana, and our detective is Robbie (short for Roberta) who has moved to South Lick in the south of the state after falling in love with the town while visiting her aunt. In this Robbie is opening her new business, a country store and restaurant, but the day after the grand opening, the mayor’s assistant is found dead and Robbie finds herself in the spotlight. This has got a lot going on, particularly with Robbie – she’s a cook and carpenter, she likes puzzles, her mum has recently died and there is a bit of a love triangle going on too. I had the culprit figured out early on but for some reason I had the second book in the series on my kindle (they’re all in KU at the moment which is how I read the first one) so had a read of that as well to see if the mystery in that was harder to solve, and it wasn’t really, but the love triangle seemed to get sorted out. Solidly OK, but not something I’d want to spend a load of money on.

And that’s your lot for this month. As a reminder the Books of the Week in July were Finders Keepers, Not to Be Taken (even more BLCC!), Next Stop Murder, We Three Queens and Death and the Conjurer, making it an incredibly Mystery-centric month when you add this to the mysteries set on film sets and bonus review of the second Gabriel Ward.

Forgotten books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: British Library Crime Classics Summer 2025

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It’s been a few months so I’m back again with some more from the British Library Crime Classics series that I’ve read. I’m starting to lose count of how many posts about BLCC books I’ve done now – whether it’s round up posts like this or Book of the Week ones, but I do rea a lot of them – thanks to their rotation in and out of Kindle Unlimited and the fact that they often pop up in the charity shop book selections at sensible prices. And so here we are again. And this has taken me way longer than I was expected because I kept ending up picking candidates for this as Books of the Week. I can’t help myself.

Murder as a Fine Art by Carol Carnac

Carol Carnac aka E C R Lorac is probably one of the best forgotten authors brought back to prominence through the BLCC series. Or at least she is in my opinion, so I try to grab her books as soon as I see them in KU. Murder as a Fine Art sees a Civil Servant crushed to death by a marble statue at the new Ministry of Fine Art. The minister in charge of the department already had some concerns about events in his department and now has to contemplate the fact that one of his staff may be a murderer. Inspector Julian Rivers is called in to investigate and try and work out what is going on. This has a clever murder but also work rivalries and grievances all mixed up with the world of fine art and modern art. It’s clever and readable.

Metropolitan Mysteries ed Martin Edwards

This is another of the short story collections from the BLCC and as the title suggests features mysteries set in London. I can sometimes find the collections a bit patchy – but this is one of the stronger ones with one proviso: because it’s got a lot of well known authors in it you may have come across some of these stories before. I had definitely read the Peter Wimsey short story before and the Allingham also seemed familiar. But if you haven’t read as much of Sayers or Allingham’s work as I have you may not have done and it’s lovely to come across familiar (and reliable) authors. And there’s one very clever if somewhat improbable mystery in here that I was completely bamboozled by and if I didn’t quite believe the solution was possible, it was so much fun I didn’t mind.

Murder in Vienna by E C R Lorac

Yes, I can’t deny it, this is the second book from the same author in this list, just under that other (main) pseudonym. This is one of her novels featuring Inspector MacDonald, but takes him away from the UK to Vienna, where he is taking a holiday and visiting an old friend Dr Nagler. Also on board the flight is Elizabeth Le Vendre, on her way to Vienna to take up her new role as secretary to a British diplomat, Sir Walter Vanbrugh. But in Vienna Elizabeth goes missing and there are a series of violent events – including murder – affecting Nagler and Vanbrugh’s connections and MacDonald finds himself investigating. This isn’t my favourite of Lorac’s books, but it is a fascinating picture of the turbulant post war situation in Vienna.

That’s your lot today – Happy Humpday!

Forgotten books, mystery, Recommendsday

Book of the Week: Not to be Taken

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It’s been a few weeks since I had a British Library Crime Classic as the BotW: it was early May that I picked Tea on Sunday so I think I’m allowed another one now.

The victim in Not to be Taken is John Waterhouse, who dies after a gastric episode which all of his friends think is accidental. But his brother doesn’t agree and forces an exhumation. Further investigations show that he was killed by arsenical poisoning and the police set out to try and figure out who was responsible. We see the story from the point of view of one of the friends, Douglas, who is a country gentleman farmer. Over the course of the book we learn more about all the characters and the options for who might have killed John become wider and wider.

Not to Be Taken was originally published as a serialisation for readers themselves to solve, with a prize available for readers who could answer the question “who was the poisoner” correctly. This BLCC edition has the solution provided, after telling the reader that they should now be able to work it out. This is very twisty and very clever. I had some ideas, but like the readers at the time, none of them were totally accurate. I’ve read a couple of of Anthony Berkley’s other books, including Murder in the Basement which was also a BotW (four years ago!) but I think this is the first of his that I’ve read that doesn’t feature his regular detective, Roger Sheringham. It’s well worth a look – I’ve had a mixed run with the more recent BLCC releases, but this is a really good one.

It’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means it isn’t on Kobo, but as I always say, these rotate through the various schemes and offers so add it to your watch list and it will come around soon I’m sure. And just to flag that for some reason the Kindle and paperback versions of this have some how ended up listed separately on Amazon, which is annoying but seems to be happening more than you would expect at the moment.

Happy Reading!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Books set in Hotels

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Happy Wednesday everyone! After a week in a hotel, with a sense of serendipity between life and reading, I’m back with a post about books set in hotels.

The Listeners by Maggie Steifvater*

So this is the book that first got me thinking about this post. As I mentioned on my preview post, this is set in a West Virginia hotel that’s been commandeered to hold Axis diplomats in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It covers the staff as they try to deal with providing luxurious accommodation to people who are part of the enemy, but in particular the hotel’s manager June and FBI agent Tucker. For me this was a case of the blurb being better than the book itself. The pacing of this was too slow for me, and the magical realism elements didn’t ever seem to come to fruition the way that I was expecting them too. But it inspired the rest of this post so that it something!

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

I read this a lot longer ago, but there’s a reason that this has been adapted for TV, made into a film and was nominated for the Booker Prize when it came out. Mrs Palfrey moves into the Claremont after the death of her husband. The characters are really well drawn and the picture of life presented is so vivid that you really can imagine the inmates of the Claremont going about their lives. The ending is somewhat melancholy – but not entirely unexpected. THis was my first Elizabeth Taylor when I read it and I have gone on to read more – including At Mrs Lippencote’s, which I wrote about not that long ago.

Bellweather Rhapsody by Katie Racculia

Hundreds of students have gathered at the Bellweather hotel for a statewide festival. Among the attendees is Minnie Graves, who 15 years ago was at the hotel when a notorious murder-suicide took place. She’s back to face her demons, but when a music prodigy disappears from the same room that the tragedy took place in, the hotel is once again the scene of an investigation. I didn’t like this as much as I did Racculia’s Tuesday Mooney, but it’s a bit like a Wes Anderson film but in a book. The cast is quirky, the plot is twisty and it’s funny as well as mysterious. Also it’s six years now since Racculia’s last novel, so I do hope there’s another one soon.

I’m currently revisiting Agatha Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel for the first time in probably 20 years and for the first time as an audiobook, which is also a lot of fun especially as I’ve watched the TV adaptation a bunch of times and it’s fun remembering what the differences are. And of course The Body at the Library, which also features a hotel as a major part of the plot and there’s also Nita Prose’s The Maid and its sequels (which I still need to read).

If you’ve got any more books with hotels as a major plot point (and I’ve read A Gentleman in Moscow already) do put them in the comments!

Happy Reading!

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!