Category: Recommendsday

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!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Unhappy Marriages

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It’s Wednesday again and it’s Easter Week. So for this week’s Recommendsday I did try and come up with something appropriate to the season. But I think I’ve already written about all the books with vicars and churches that I can think of pretty recently (although more are bound to come to me as soon as this post publishes, so you never know), so instead I’m back with a post about unhappy marriages in fiction – of various kinds. This post is entirely inspired by reading At Mrs Lippencote’s last week.

Paperback copy of At Mrs Lippencote's

Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippencote’s is set during the Second World War, when Julia joins her husband Roddy in a rented house near his RAF base. Their son Oliver is also with them as is Roddy’s cousin Eleanor. It is not a happy household. Julia and Roddy are not really well suited – he thought that she would grow and mature into her role as an officer’s wife under his guidance, while she thinks very little of the things that she is meant to do because of her “position”. They don’t spend a lot of time together, but what time they do spend together is mostly low-level unhappy as neither can ever do anything that will please the other. That makes it sound miserable – but it’s a social comedy, which I always enjoy. It was Taylor’s first novel – and although I like some of her others more, it’s definitely worth a look.

Julia has a husband problem – or does Roddy have a wife problem? – whichever way you call it, it’s an unhappy marriage and there are plenty of those around, particularly in novels set in the 1930s and 1940s. Whether it’s hurried marriages because people didn’t know each other well enough and there was a war coming (or happening) or marriages changed by war, there are plenty of options in books from the era.

In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust Tony and Brenda Last have been married for a little under a decade, have an eight year old son and live in a country pile. He thinks they’re happy, but Brenda is bored and starts an affair – which sets Tony on the road that eventually leads to utter disaster. This gets pretty bleak (in ways I can’t explain because: spoilers) but it’s clever and from the tail end of Waugh’s satirical era, before he turned into his more realistic and also more religious novels.

There are plenty of unhappy marriages in Daphne Du Maurier too, you can basically take your pick because there’s almost always one miserable marriage in her novels somewhere. And if you pick Rebecca you can try and decide which Mrs De Winter has the worst marriage – the first or the second! But Frenchman’s Creek would also work and possibly doesn’t get as much notice and it has pirates (it’s set in the Restoration).

Jumping a couple of centuries forward in time not to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. It’s the early 1980s, Rachel is very pregnant and has just discovered that her husband is in love with another woman. Across the course of the (very short) book, she cooks food (she’s a cookery writer), tries to win him back and rages against the world. If you’ve watched any of Ephron’s films you’ll recognise a few lines here and there from that. And it was inspired by the breakdown of Ephron’s own second marriage to the Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate exposé fame).

There are of course plenty of unhappy marriages in mystery fiction – but given that often one of them ends up dead or doing murders it would be a bit of a spoiler to include them here. There are plenty of them in Agatha Christie’s books though, and Christie’s own disappearance and the breakdown in her first marriage has been extensively writen about. The Christie Affair by Nina Grammont was a BotW back in 2022 and is a reimagining of what happened when Christie went missing, written from the perspective of her husband’s mistress. It’s a hard one to write about without giving too much away – but I did try and give it ago in my review, so do check that out.

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Recommendsday: April Kindle Offers

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It may only be the 9th, but it’s already the second Wednesday of April and so it’s Kindle Offers o’clock again.

Lets start with a couple of books that I really enjoyed. Firstly there’s Elissa Sussman‘s former BotW Funny You Should Ask which is 99p, as is Jen DeLuca’s Well Played, the first in her Renaissance Faire series, and Christina Lauren’s In a Holidaze which is completely out of season at the moment, but is great. Early Morning Riser from Katherine Heiney is 99p and former BotW Standard Deviation is in Kindle Unlimited – I’m hoping we’ll get news on something new from her soon too. Rachel Lynn Solomon‘s The Ex Talk is 99p – it’s not my favourite of hers, because I had an issue with the journalistic ethics in it, but I know others didn’t have the same problem.

I’ve been on a massive Elly Griffiths binge over the last month and a half so it would be remiss of me not to mention that her latest book The Frozen People is 99p at the moment. It only came out a the end of February and it is the first in a new series featuring cold cases and what the blurb would suggest is time travel – and so of course I bought it while writing this post! In other murder mysteries, former BotW The Darkest Sin is 99p, as is the second Three Dahlias A Very Lively Mystery, and the second in the Rivers of London series, Moon over Soho.

In Golden Age crime writers, Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar is 99p, Georges Simenon’s The Hanging Man of Saint-Pholien. As a side note: more and more classic crime novels are now getting lots and lots of very cheap kindle editions, where it’s hard to know if they are any good or not. So it’s not exactly 99p, but all the “proper” Harper Collins kindle editions of the Miss Marple series are £2.99 at the moment. They’ve also got relatively new audiobook readings with narrators like Richard E Grant, Stephanie Cole and Emilia Fox, which are the ones that I’m listening too at the moment. And as E C R Lorac’s books perform well in their BLCC editions, there are more of her books popping up in other Kindle editions too – lots of which are 99p, although as ever I can’t vouch for the quality of all of them, although the ones that I have read have been ok.

In other authors I like, Anthony Horowitz’s With a Mind to a Kill, which is one of his James Bond novel is on offer for 99p, as is PG Woodhouse’s Summer Lightning which is one of the Blandings series,

And finally, in things I own but haven’t read yet and are now 99p: The Divorcees, Why Shoot a Butler by Georgette Heyer and Assistant to the Villain – which I’ve been waiting to drop in price for a while and which I bought while writing this post!

Happy Humpday everyone

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: March Quick Reviews

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So the problem with a massive binge on one author – and one series – is that it doesn’t leave a lot of other things to write about. And so here we are, with a two book children’s book review special for the quick reviews this month. Which makes it three classic middle grade books in just over a week after Juliet Overseas the other week!

Gemma by Noel Streatfeild

This was a Carlisle acquisition and is a later Streatfeild talented children story. And I love this sort of thing. There is ballet in this – but it’s not the key focus. The Gemma of the title is the daughter of an actress, who has herself been a child star. But she’s reached the awkward age and the parts have dried up. Her mother however has been offered a part in a tv series and sends Gemma to stay with her sister and her husband and their children. Gemma has never lived a normal life – but her cousins are not what she expects – they musical in various ways and are quite happy to add Gemma to their lives and try and help her adjust. It’s charming.

A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley

This is one of my Bristol purchases from last summer after the talk about time travel and time slip stories for children. I read Alison Utley’s Little Grey Rabbit books as a child, but never this. Traveller in Time is set in the 1930s when a group of children visit their aunt at her farm in Derbyshire and one of them, Penelope finds herself slipping back in time to the sixteenth century when the house was owned by Francis Babbington, who is at the centre of a plot to try to free Mary Queen of Scots. It’s quite a quiet novel in terms of action but it’s very evocative of the the two time periods – and you know your history, you will feel sympathy for Pen as she knows what is to come.

And that’s your lot this month. The good news is I only have a couple of Ruth Galloway books to go, so next month I should have more choices…

Happy Humpday!

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Recommendsday: Spring-time books

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It’s daylight during my train ride to work at the moment (until the clocks change at the weekend, but lets gloss over that) and the weather is improving (mostly) so today I’ve got some spring-like books for you.

Obviously lets start with Elizabeth von Arnim’s Enchanted April. I’ve written a whole post about it already and I really do love it. I actually (finally) have the movie version to watch on the Tivo (it was shown on BBC Four a few weeks back) and I have been saving it until it started to feel spring-y. Which is maybe this weekend?

I did a whole post of books about fresh starts last year, but the other sort of book that I like to read at this time of year are coming of age or people discovering themselves type novels so books like Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle or Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm or even Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.

It’s also a great time to read soothing books set in the countryside – often the sort of books where not a lot happens – like Diary of a Provincial Lady or some of the early Angela Thirkell Barsetshire novels.

And of course there are plenty of boarding school books set in the spring term – I honestly thought I had a list somewhere of which Chalet School books where set in which terms, but I cannot find it anywhere. This is very annoying to me. And I don’t have my actual collection to hand right now so I can’t even pick one and be sure-sure because the internet is not helpful for this. Urgh. Shall I just punt at Chalet Girls in Camp because by the nature of camping in Austria (in 1930) it has to have been Easter or later? Well I’ve done it now haven’t I?! It should at least be marginally easier to get hold of than Juliet Overseas because it was reprinted a lot more times. I’ve got at least two copies myself…

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Books set in Ireland

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It was St Patrick’s Day on Monday, and that’s given me an excellent excuse to think about books set in Ireland for today’s Recommendsday post.

I’m going to start with Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. This is on of those books that I bought basically it was in a lovely Virago Hardback and the plot summary appealed to me. It was nominated for the Booker when it came out in 1981 so it’s also a rare example of an award-nominated book that I actually enjoyed! Anyway this is the story of Aroon St Charles, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family now falling (if not fallen) into decay. Although it starts when Aroon is nearly 60, most of the book is set years earlier in the 1910s and 1920s – and its mostly about the conflict between her and her mother. There’s a fair bit of decoding to do about what it actually going on and part of the beauty of the book is that you’re never quite sure if Aroon knows what’s going on and is being deliberately obtuse or if she really is that oblivious. Definitely worth looking for – if you want a longer and much more erudite review of it (with spoilers) then here’s on from the London Review of Books. I’m pretty sure I’ve got at least one of her other books sitting on the shelf waiting to be read – I really should get around to that!

A different sort of mid-century Ireland now, and Maeve Binchy. I read my way through a lot of these when I was a teenager when her books seemed to be everywhere, but in the decade and a bit since she died that seems to have changed. I think Tara Road is usually the one that gets talked about – but I think Light A Penny Candle was my favourite, but that may be because I read it at the same time that I was going through a huge phase of reading sagas (Barbara Taylor Bradford! Elizabeth Jane Howard! )and it gave me similar vibes to that – I haven’t read it in years and I do wonder if I would feel the same way now, or whether adult Verity would go for Scarlet Feather or something else entirely.

I was slightly older when I started reading Marian Keyes, but not *that* much older – I think my sister read her first and passed the books on to me – because our copy of Last Chance Saloon was definitely the original UK paperback one. Keyes is funny and smart but she’ll also break your heart – all her books deal with difficult issues, often including addiction and depression which she herself has experienced and spoken about very movingly. I’ve got a bit behind over the years, but Keye’s iconic Walsh Sisters series is being adapted for TV at the moment, so maybe this is the time for me to catch up.

Another Irish author who will break your heart is Anna McPartlin. I’m also behind with her books, but The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes and Somewhere Inside of Happy were both books of the week back in the early days of the blog – both of which reduced me to tears, in either trains or hostel rooms. I’ve definitely read a lot less books that I think are going to make me cry in the years since the start of the pandemic, because I’ve prioritised happy endings and closure in my reading amid the uncertainty of the world in general, but if you are more resilient than me, I do recommend her.

And that’s it for today – have a good one everyone!

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Recommendsday: March Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month, which means Kindle Offers day and oh boy it’s a bumper month.

On the romance front the offers include Christina Lauren‘s The True Love Experiment, Kristina Forrest‘s The Neighbor Favor, Mhairi MacFarlane‘s It’s Not Me, It’s You, Rachel Lynn Solomon‘s Business of Pleasure and Etta Easton’s The Kiss Countdown which I still have on the to-read pile. Ali Hazelwood has a new adult book out this month but Check and Mate her YA novel is on offer for 99p

In mystery and crime it’s a good month for mysteries with vicars with both the first Grantchester book, Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death and the first Canon Clement mystery Murder Before Evensong on offer. Then there’s the third Three Dahlia’s book, Seven Lively Suspects, Nita Prose’s The Maid (the third one is out in April), Jesse Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. In classic crime, Josephine Tey‘s The Franchise Affair is on offer as is another of the seasonal Agatha Christie short story collections, this time Sinister Spring.

I already mentioned on Friday that the Lady Julia Grey series are on offer – but it bears repeating. Going further back in history, there’s PD James’s Death Comes to Pemberley at £1.79, the seventh and it looks like final Shardlake mystery Tombland is back on offer at 99p as is Philippa Gregory‘s The Constant Princess about Catherine of Aragon ahead of another joining the series in the autumn (The Boleyn Traitor about Jane Boleyn).

There’s a bunch of TV-tie in, or TV related books on offer this month too. There’s Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen which has just been turned into a TV series, as well as the first Hawthorn and Horowitz The Word Is Murder, not long after the adaptation of Horowitz’s Moonflower Murders (and not long now before the third book in that series arrives). THere’s also Enola Holmes and there are a few Julia Quinns on offer, including the final Bridgerton book, Gregory’s story On the Way to the Wedding and Mr Cavendish, I Presume,

On the non-fiction front, there are actually quite a lot of celebrity memoirs on offer too – I haven’t read these, but they all had good reviews when they came out: Pamela Anderson’s Love, Pamela, Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me, Viola Davis’s Finding Me and Lauren Graham’s Have I Told You This Already. Not quite a celebrity in the traditional sense but Anne Glenconnor’s Lady in Waiting is on offer too as is Susannah Constantine’s Ready for Absolutely Nothing.

There are also some pretty good history books on offer, like Dan Jones’s The Hollow Crown, Lucy Worsley’s Queen Victoria, and although I haven’t read this one, the Elizabeth I book in the Penguin Monarchs series – these are really good short surveys of monarch’s lives written by notable historians, in the case of Elizabeth I it’s Helen Castor.

One of my favourite Terry Pratchetts is on offer at £1.99 this month: It’s the wonderful Going Postal! GNU Sir Terry. Also on my favourites shelf and on offer are: the third Cazalet Chronicle Confusion (with yet another fresh cover, this time one that I don’t like) and the third Tales of the City – Further Tales of the City, Barbara Pym‘s Excellent Women, Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, the cheap Georgette Heyers continue to include Devil’s Cub,

And it was an bad month for my willpower because books I bought while writing this post included: Julian Clary’s Curtain Call to Murder, Maigret and the Wine Merchant, Very Good, Jeeves, Remember Me by Mary Balogh, BK Borison‘s new release First Time Caller, and Jilly Cooper’s The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous.

Good luck at having more will power than me!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: February Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month, and I’m back with the quick reviews. And for the first time in ages I actually finished all of the books I had from NetGalley that came out last month. Who knew I was even capable of that. Anyway, here we are with a quick round up of three books – two murder mysteries and a romance – I haven’t already told you about.

Murder in the Dressing Room by Holly Stars*

This is a cozy mystery set in the world of drag performers in London. Our “detective” is Misty/Joe who discovers the body of her drag mother backstage at a club night and starts investigating because the police seem more focused on the stolen dress that Lady Lady was wearing. I really liked the setting for this – I walk around Soho quite a lot as it’s near my office, and lots of the locations were familiar to me. I liked Misty and the way you could see how her persona changed when she was Misty compared to normal life as Joe. However they were a little foolhardy/too stupid to live at times. There’s a big hanging plot thread for the next one which I’m not sure about, but overall I enjoyed this and would read more in the series if it came my way.

The Tube Train Murder by Hugh Morrison

This was another new(ish) release – that came out in early January, but that I didn’t spot straightaway. This is a new standalone mystery from the author of the Reverend Shaw mysteries, which I binged my way through last year. This sees a young woman murdered on a tube train, and the investigation taking in the residents or the boarding house where she was living while she went to secretarial college. Those residents include another student at the same college who is unhappy at the progress the police are making. The mystery is good – and the boarding house setting is well drawn. It’s in Kindle unlimited so like yesterday’s The Ten Teacups worth a look if you’re a member.

Book Boyfriend by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka*

I really, really enjoyed The Roughest Draft which I bought two years ago and was a BotW. I was then disappointed and puzzled by The Break Up tour last year – which was the husband and wife duo’s Taylor Swift inspired romance. This is set at an immersive experience based on a romantasy novel, where two work colleagues and sort-of-enemies unexpectedly encounter each other. I was hoping this would be closer to the Roughest Draft than The Break Up Tour, but sadly it’s another puzzler for me. I didn’t understand why the two leads hadn’t just had a conversation to clear the air after their initial misunderstanding, and the heroine was just really immature for how old – and established in her career – she is meant to be. Frustrating. I still have the book that came in between Roughest Draft and Break Up tour on the Kindle waiting to be read and I’m starting to worry that that first one I liked was a fluke…

And that’s the lot for this month. Given how short February is, I’m pleased with myself for even getting to free!

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Fairytale retellings

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So as it happens, today is Tell a Fairy Tale day, so in honour of that today’s post is about fairytale retellings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these are romances, but as i recommend a lot of romance already, I’m sure you won’t mind!

Let’s start with Geekerella, which is the first in Ashley Poston’s Once Upon a Con series, which is a YA romance series. As the name would suggest this is a Cinderella retelling, with a heroine who is a massive fan of a classic sci fi series, and a hero who is the star of a new movie adaptation. As ever with Cinderella stories, my main issues were around the meanness of the stepfamily, but I got past that – and it has a dachshund. And it should also be noted that my least favourite of the Bridgerton series is the Cinderella story – Benedict’s book, An Offer From a Gentleman, which is the third in the series but which I was delighted when the skipped it to go straight to Pen and Colin. I don’t think I’ve ever reread it, which says something but also maybe I should to see if I reassess it now.

Eloisa James has a whole series of fairy tale reworkings that she wrote after her Desperate Duchesses books. As well as Cinderella, she took on The Princess and the Pea, the Ugly Duckling, Rapunzel and my favourite of the series: Beauty and the Beast. In When Beauty Tamed the Beast, the hero has serious Dr House vibes. He’s cranky and does doctor stuff in deepest darkest rural Wales. She’s a society beauty who has accidentally managed to ruin her reputation and decided he is the answer. There is snark. There are independent characters. Just writing about it makes me want to read it again. Talking of Beauty and the Beast, the third Once Upon a Con is Bookish and the Beast and that’s also really fun. And for all of you who fell in love with the Beast in the Disney movie when Belle found his library: this is doing a riff on that. Also I maintain the beast in the Disney animated movie was hotter before he changed back into a prince.

I haven’t read this yet – but I do have it on the Kindle I think – but Sherry Thomas has a Mulan retelling. It’s called the Magnolia Sword and as you know I do love a a story with a girl dressed up as a boy (Masqueraders, Twelfth Night, etc etc) and it’s also a perfect excuse to post a clip of another of my favourite Disney heroes in one of my favourite musical numbers

Also on the list of books I own but haven’t read (yet) is T J Klune’s Pinocchio retelling In The Lives of Puppets. I will get there soon. And if you’ve read the book of the movie Wicked, the author of the novel that inspired the movie (but is very different and much darker) Gregory Maguire has also done some work in fairytales as well as in the wonderful land of Oz – including Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. And finally there’s an Amazon shorts series that’s inspired by fairy tales called The Faraway collection, which I have read a couple of mostly because the first one is by Rainbow Rowell.

And that’s your lot today – Happy Reading!

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Recomendsday: Books set in Yorkshire

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After picking a Kate Shackleton yesterday which was particularly evocative of Yorkshire I thought I’d mention a few more books set around the county

Let’s start with one of my very favourite Georgette Heyer’s – Venetia. Most of this is set in and around Venetia and Damerel’s houses in rural Yorkshire. Venetia is feisty and independent- but Jasper is one of Heyer’s best hero’s and among the most well fleshed out. Another Yorkshire set historical romance – but with a very different vibe – is Sarah MacLean’s Ten Ways to be Adored while Landing a Lord. Our heroine is running the family estate with very little money, and the hero is escaping from fashionable society to the country. This is the second in the Love by Numbers series.

When other people were reading Rivals, I was reading Barbara Taylor Bradford. And A Woman of Substance is set in Leeds and the surrounding countryside. I think this was the first book with sex scenes I ever read but it’s mostly a big old saga as Emma Harte raises herself up from housemaid to department store tycoon. I did read the rest of the trilogy and some of her others, but I think this – which was her big breakthrough was the best.

I mentioned it in the summer when I went to see the stage adaptation at the Open Air Theatre, but a reminder that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is set in Yorkshire. I’m going to admit that I haven’t reread this since I was a child, so I can’t swear to how the original is aging… and of course there’s also James Heriot and his adventures in veterinary medicine.

Another book I read recently is Sovereign, the third in the Shardlake series, which sees Matthew following in the train of Henry VIII as he makes his progress to York. As well as a good murder plot it’s also really good at creating sixteenth century York – and given how much of old York still exists you can really conjure up the settings in your head. It was particularly good for me because my history supervisor at university was based in Kings Manor, which is one of the principal locations.

And finally several of the series I really like have installments in yorkshire – including Lady Julia Grey and Royal Spyness, but you really need to ahve read the others to get the most out of them.

Happy Humpday everyone!