Category: Recommendsday

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: February Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for some more Kindle offers. And I’m not going to lie, given that it’s Valentine’s Day this month, I was expecting more romances on offer than I actually found. But hey, maybe this is counter programming?

Lets star with the romances I did find though. There’s an older Katie Fforde Living Dangerously, Casey McQuiston’s Red, White and Royal Blue, Kirsty Greenwood’s The Love of My Afterlife, How to End a Love Story (which I had some reservations about), recent release (and even more recently mentioned) Not in My Book and one of the Christina Laurens I haven’t read – Love and Other Words.

There are a few intriguing looking new releases on offer – like Frances White’s Voyage of the Damned, which claims “if Agatha Christie wrote fantasy, this would be it” which is quite the claim and almost enough to get me to buy it without reading a sample for 99p. But not quite enough because I’m working on that impulse control, so I have the sample on the Kindle now.

If you want to start the Rivers of London series ahead of the next book this summer, the first book is 99p this month. There are a couple of Agatha Christies on offer too – Sparkling Cyanide and Nemesis. Also in old favourites there’s Memoirs of a Geisha, which I first read at uni and is way better than the movie of it is.

In stuff I have but haven’t read yet, there’s T J Klune’s retelling of Pinoccio In the Lives of Puppets and Stephanie Garber’s Caravel.

Two Discworld books to flag this month – I Shall Wear Midnight from the Tiffany Aching middle grade series is 99p and Feet of Clay from the Watch sequence is £1.99. There’s a Georgette Heyer murder mystery, Death in the Stocks, on offer at 99p as well as a few romances including one of my all time favourites in Devil’s Cub and short story collection Pistols for Two at £1.99.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Quick Reviews

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The first month of 2025 is over and so I’m back with another whistle-stop tour through a couple of books that I read last month that I didn’t already tell you about.

Vanishing Box by Elly Griffiths

Let’s start this month with a rule breaking mid-series book. But there’s a reason for this I promise. Vanishing Box is the fourth in Griffiths’ series set in Brighton in the early 1950s. It’s been five years since I read the third book but my mum’s book club picked the first one just before Christmas and it reminded me that I had forgotten to go and read any more of them. And this is a good instalment in the series. The general premise is that Edgar Stephens is a police detective but in World War 2 he worked in a shadowy unit with Max Mephisto who is a magician. They fall back into each other’s orbit during the first book (The Zigzag Girl) and have stayed there since. This book sees Max performing on the bill of a variety show in Brighton and Edgar investigating the death of a flower shop worker who happened to be living in the same boarding house as some of the other performers on the bill with Max. You could read this without reading the rest of the series, but it will definitely work best if you’ve got the background.

Natural Selection by Elin Hilderbrand

A short story on the list this month – this is an Amazon Original that follows Sophia, a New Yorker who has finally found a man she can see herself settling down with, but who finds herself on a couples trip alone after an emergency means he has to bail on her as they’re about to board the flight. This sends Sophia on a journey of self discovery – the holiday was his choice – so Sophia finds herself the fish out of a water on a once in a lifetime trip to the Galapagos Islands – without her boyfriend, without her phone signal (most of the time) and too embarrassed to talk to anyone about what’s going on. Hildebrand packs a lot into just over 50 pages and I found it surprisingly emotional as well as satisfying.

Not in My Book by Katie Holt*

As I previewed this when it came out, I thought I ought to follow up now I’ve read it. This is an enemies to lovers romance about two writers who are forced to write a book together after they take their classroom rivalry one step too far for their professor to let slide. If New Adult was still a thing, I would say that this is squarely in that area, but it’s not really any more so I don’t really know what to call it. And I think for some people this is going to work really well. It’s being compared to Sally Thorne‘s The Hating Game in the blurb and I think that’s pretty fair, but I think these two are maybe meaner to each other than those two. And that was my problem: they’re awful to each other and although I enjoyed it once they started getting along, as soon as there is any hint of conflict they revert to saying the most hurtful things they can to each other, and that’s just not my thing. Maybe it’s the age of the main characters and I’m just too old for that now – but it ended up being the end of the trope that I find hard to get on board with.

And that’s your lot for this month – a reminder of the Books of the Week from January: White House by the Sea, Deadly Summer Nights, Dark Tort and The Paradise Problem.

Happy Reading!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Blues selections

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It’s the tail end of January. It feels like a long time since Christmas. You could be forgiven for having a bit of the blues at the moment. So I’ve got a bit of a recommendsday supercut for you, of suggestions to try and help you through the gloom and towards the spring.

First of all I have a whole list of novels about fresh starts – not to be confused with the non fiction post of self help books. I’ve also got a lot of recommendations for books about house renovations- which are a sort of fresh start aren’t they? – whether it’s this recommendsday post or the Fixer Upper mysteries, the Real Estate Rescue ones or a romance with Maggie Moves On?

I find small town romances very comforting but also cheering – so how about Happily Inc or Blessings? But maybe you want to escape away to somewhere tropical. Obviously The Paradise Problem was book of the week the other week but there’s also The Unhoneymooners. And finally if you want to go completely the other way there’s ski resort action with the O’Neil Brothers.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: US Presidents special

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As you may have noticed, the US presidency has changed hands this week, so for recommendsday this week, I have a few books – and other posts to point you at if you want a US politics fix. And I’ve even got a photo of the White House from my time in DC in 2018 to fancy it up a bit!

First of all, let me point you at my JFK adjacent post – which has got a whole lot of fiction and non fiction about the Kennedy family – and I’m currently reading even more on top of that with the White Hiuse by the Sea nearly finished and also Ask Not waiting on the pile. There’s also post I wrote for the first Trump Inauguration eight years ago, which has a bit of cross over too.

Then there’s Kate Anderson Brower who has written a lot about The White House and what it’s like to live there. There’s First Women, First in Line and Team of Five – about the wives of presidents, the vice presidents and the club of former presidents respectively – there’s a bit over overlap between them so maybe just pick the topic that interests you most.

And if you want a bit of lesser spotted presidential scandal, there’s also Rachel Maddow’s Bag Man about Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s disgraced VP.

Happy Humpday!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Kindle Offers

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It’s January. It’s incredibly cold. So you should buy books. And there are some kindle bargains to help you with that!

Let’s start with two authors who I mentioned in my anticipated books post at the weekend. Firstly Taylor Jenkins Reid whose tennis comeback story Carrie Soto is Back is 99p this month just in time for the Australian Open. Then there is Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five – also 99p and really worth reading – especially given how much it upset a lot of the so-called “Ripperologists”. If you’re interested in social history and the lives that women lead in the past (and that don’t often get covered) you will find it really interesting, even if (like me) you don’t usually do Jack the Ripper content.

We’re under a week away from another Presidential inauguration (and we just had the funeral of another former president), and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife is on offer – this is her book that’s inspired by Laura Bush. I like it (but not as much as I like Romantic Comedy) and I am looking forward to her collection of short stories that is coming out next month. Ready Player One is back on offer – I like the book way more than the film, and I say that as someone who likes the film, although I still haven’t managed to bring myself to read the sequel.

On the non-fiction front, there is Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking – which I actually listened to on audiobook (read by Carrie herself) a few years ago (while painting the spare room at the old house), but as a tale of growing up in Hollywood it’s incredible – and really funny and well written: after all Fisher was a script doctor who punched up the scripts of movies including favourites of mine like Sister Act and The Wedding Singer. On the history front, we have Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII which is a good starting point if you’re interested in the wives and want to know more. Also in the historical overview section of reading is Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, which is some of the most fun you can have reading about an era where the Plague could get you if the dysentery didn’t and if a woman made it to my age she was doing well. Talking about fun historical reads: Greg Jenner‘s Ask a Historian is also on offer, I’m guessing because there’s about to be a new series of You’re Dead To Me.

Excellent news on the Terry Pratchett front: Men at Arms is £1.99 this month. It’s the second in the Watch sequence, but it’s still early enough in the series that you can read it standalone without missing too many jokes. This one is playing with all the tropes about secret kings as well as a band of misfits finding home in the city police force. Also on offer is the graphic novel The Last Hero, which was a BotW a couple of years ago. This month’s Georgette Heyer is Black Sheep, there are Agatha Raisins and Hamish MacBeth’s on offer in the form of Down the Hatch and Death of a Spy. Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue which is the first in the Alan Grant series is 99p

In stuff I have waiting on the tbr pile (virtual or otherwise) that is on offer, we have Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip (now in a tie-in edition because of the Paramount+ adaptation), Frank and Red by Matt Coyne, which is about an unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly old man and the six year old who moves in next door to him. The Socialites was my Amazon Prime reads pick last month – and is now out and 99p. It says it’s for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid (tick), Katherine Tessaro (tick) and Fiona Davis (tick) and follows three girls from their convent school in the 1920s to their lives as actresses and writers and similar. This definitely falls into the fictionalised real people area of my reading wheelhouse.

And finally, in other stuff worth mentioning, Elusive, the second in Genevieve Cogman’s French Revolution series is on offer, ahead of the release of the third in the series later this year.

Happy Wednesday!

Christmas books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Christmas Novellas

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It’s the week before Christmas and I have a stack of Christmas books that I want to read – but I’ve mostly only managed novellas so far because of the fact that I haven’t finished that pesky 50 states thing. So for this week’s Recommendsday I wanted to mention a few – some that I’ve read in previous years and haven’t written about yet, and one that’s new this year!

Holiday Hideaway by Mary Kay Andrews

This one is the new this year and has a newly single – and unexpectedly homeless – woman who is using one of the vacation rentals she manages as somewhere to live in the gap before her new home is ready. Except then the house’s new owner turns up to get it ready for sale and suddenly she’s hiding in the attic while he’s staying downstairs. I was slightly sceptical about this as a premise, but actually by the end it did work. This is going to be divisive – because the new owner has a girlfriend back in the city and I know that’s a hard no for some people. But for me it was a fun slightly nonsense read that maybe isn’t quite as Christmas-themed as the cover would suggest. Oh, and I wish Andrews had specified a location in it, it would have made my life so much easier…

Missing Christmas by Kate Clayborn

This is the novella that fits in as book three and a half in Clayborn’s Chance of a Lifetime series, which features one of the side characters from the first book getting his chance at a happy ending with his business partner when the two of them are snowed in at the house of a scientist they’re trying to recruit – so forced proximity and only one bed in the festive season. I enjoyed it and if you like Claybourn’s writing – which I obviously do – this is definitely worth checking out.

A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong by Cecilia Grant

How about a historical romance novella with birds of prey? Fancy a falcon this Christmas? Yes? No? This has a hero who is trying to make a perfect Christmas for his family before his sister gets married and things change, and a heroine who is delivering the falcon he’s ordered on the way to a Christmas party. Except that there’s snow and an issue with her carriage and suddenly they’re stuck together and in the wrong place. Yes, I know another forced proximity Christmas novel – but snowed in at Christmas is a trope for a reason: it works really well! This is a prequel to a series of novels about the hero’s siblings, which I haven’t read – but Cecilia Grant says she specialises in high angst-to-plot ratios, so they may not be my thing because: angst. Anyway, if you want a historical novella this year, this worked for me.

Happy Humpday everyone!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: December Kindle Offers

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It’s the last month of the year and I’m back with the final kindle offers post of 2024!

And as it’s December, lets start with the Christmas books: Sarah Morgan’s latest The Christmas Cottage is 99p, as is last Christmas’s Tessa Bailey Wreck the Halls, seasonal short stories from P G Wodehouse Jolly Festive, Jeeves, Susan Mallery’s The Christmas Wedding Guest,

Also with a few on sale, it’s the new adaptations. Anthony Horowitz‘s Moonflower Murders is 99p – the TV version is on at the moment (as well as a new one coming next year) and Frederick Forsythe’s Day of the Jackal is on offer too as the new Eddie Redmayne series is going out on Sky at the moment too. I’m still not over the 1970s movie version, and I’m not sure I can bring myself to read the book.

There are also a few former BotW’s on offer at 99p, like Ashley Poston‘s The Seven Year Slip, Jessse Sutano’s Dial A For Aunties and Erin Morgenstern‘s The Starless Sea. Then there’s Libby Page’s The Lifeline, T J Klune’s Under the Whispering Door and Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes.

The latest Lady Hardcastle An Assassination on the Agenda is 99p, Terry Pratchett’s A Stroke of the Pen is £1.99. The recent addition to the Miss Marple canon of short stories written by current crime writers, Marple short stories is 99p, as is last year’s Steph Plum – which I haven’t read because I think I might have given up on them – Dirty Thirty.

And finally I don’t often recommend coookery books in ebook form but Diana Henry’s From the Oven to the Table is one of my favourites and has some really excellent recipes for chicken thighs.

That’s your lot – Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday, reviews

Recommendsday: November Quick Reviews

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Another month over, and as you probably saw on Monday, a mega reading list to finish the month off, because we were on holiday. Only one of these is actually something finished on the holiday – but I promise you will hear more about a bunch of those holiday books at some point. However in the meantime here’s a three of the books I read in November and haven’t told you about yet!

Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin

I’m slowly working my way through the Gervase Fen series – so slowly in fact that they’ve now started a fresh redesign since I started reading them. I’ve now read six of the ten slightly out of order as this is in fact book seven. It sees Gervase entangled with the movie making set and trying to untangle the mystery around the death of a young actress who threw herself from Waterloo Bridge one night after a party. I had part of the solution figured out, but not all the whys and wherefores so it was a good read finding out.

Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans*

The Second World War is over and Valentine Vere-Thissett is on his way home. Except the war has changed his world – his elder brother has been killed, leaving him with a title he doesn’t want and and now the fate of his family home, built in the 1500s, in his hands. I have really enjoyed a lot of Lissa Evans’s novels, but for some reason this one didn’t quite work as well as I wanted it to. It’s got all the elements – a reluctant younger son taking over, post war setting, an ill-assorted group of people thrown together, but just this time, it didn’t provoke as strong a set of emotions as her books usually do. It’s still good, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not brilliant, and I was hoping for brilliant.

A Body on the Doorstep by Marty Wingate

It’s 1921 and Mabel Canning has moved to London to try and strike out on her own and be a Modern Woman. To this end she’s got a job with the Useful Women’s Agency, but one one of her assignments a dead body turns up on the doorstep when she answers the door. And of course she can’t help but get drawn in to trying to figure out what happened to him. This was the latest in my quest to find a new historical mystery series to fill the gap left by the end of the Daisy Dalrymple books. And it’s not bad – the mystery isn’t the most complicated, but it’s got a fair bit of set up to do and characters to introduce as the first in the series so I don’t mind that too much. It’s in KU so I will likely read more of them as and when I get a chance.

And there you are, that’s your lot today – but a quick reminder of the November Books of the Month, which were Rivals, Top of the Climb, The Anti-Social Season and Death at the Dress Rehearsal

Christmas books, Forgotten books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Classic Christmas mysteries

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Anyway, some Christmas murder mysteries for you today – and did I say I was done with British Library Crime Classics for the year? Ahem. Here I am with a post that’s two thirds BLCC. And that’s if you’re being charitable. It’s probably more like three quarters. Oopsie Daisy.

Santa Klaus Murders by Mavis Doriel Hay

Starting with one I read a while ago – in fact I’ve read Mavis Doriel Hay’s other crime novels, which were among the first BLCCs I read and they are brilliant, but forgotten, Golden Age crime stories. This is no exception. A Christmas set house-party murder – with chapters written by various different character – it ticks all the boxes for what I look for in a murder mystery. It’s well worth starting your Christmas reading with this – especially as it’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment.

Dramatic Murder by Elizabeth Anthony

So this is the new BLCC release for this Christmas, and features the murder (even if the courts think it’s accidental death) of the host of a Christmas show party by one of the guests. I will admit that I had the culprit worked out before the end, but as far as Christmas mysteries go, this is a pretty good one.

Midwinter Murder by Agatha Christie

The Autumn equivalent of this was a BotW not that long ago, but I think this winter version is maybe slightly better – at least if you like Christie’s big name detectives. This has plenty of Poirot in it as well as some Miss Marple, Parker Pyne and Harley Quinn and the mix is pretty good. And of course the fact that it’s short stories means that you can read one, and then go do something else – ideal if you’re preparing for Christmas!

Just a couple more from the British Library to mention before I go: firstly Mystery in White by J Jefferson Farjeon – I’m the reverse of most people in that I prefered Seven Dead to Mystery in White, but if you want a locked room Christmas mystery, then this might be it. Then of course there is Christmas Card Crime – book of the week just after Christmas 2021. Silent Nights collection – BotW back in 2015!

Happy Reading!

Recommendsday, romance

Book of the Week: Rivals

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I was trying to work out when I was finishing the Week in Books yesterday how obvious it was that what I was going to pick today. I was figuring that given that I wrote about the adaptation on Sunday and then a 700 page plus book appeared on the list and had been read in under a week the signs might have been there. But who can tell the workings of my mind? Anyway, here we are.

So (obviously) this is the book the Disney+ series is based on. And what I didn’t mention in the post on Sunday is that the eight parts of the adaptation don’t cover the whole of the book. And having been left on a cliffhanger of not knowing l of course I wanted to see how it all turned out without having to wait however many years it’s going to be for series two. If we get a series two because I’ve been burned before (see: My Lady Jane, Pushing Daisies, The New Adventures of Superman). And also I wanted to know how different the book is from the show.

And the answer to that second question is it’s pretty close. There are a few things that happen a bit differently most of which I can’t mention because of spoilers but the one I can is that Rupert being blonde in the book and dark haired in the show. And that didn’t bother me because traditionally I prefer a dark and brooding hero and I saw the adaptation first. I’m fickle me. The 80s attitudes to some things are still there in the book – but some of the best lines in the show come directly from the book dialogue.

Some of the people are worse in the TV show than the book, others the reverse. There are a few characters in the show who are more fleshed out on screen than they were in the book. I was wondering how they could do a whole other season out of what was left of the book but there’s so much plot still to cover I’m pretty sure they can – especially if they want to bring a few of the things that are different back around to the book. Plus the ending of the book is all very fast. So there’s a bit of scope there.

All in all it’s deeply readable and although it satisfied my craving for resolution it probably made me even more desperate for series two sooner rather than later. Hey ho. At least I can reread/rewatch if I want to.

You should be able to get a copy of this absolutely everywhere given the adaption and of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too. Plus there’s a new reading of the audiobook performed by Georgia Tennant aka David’s wife if you want a bit of a crossover effect and nearly twenty five hours of audio to listen to!

Happy Reading!