Category: reviews

new releases, series

Series Update: Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey mysteries

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It’s been three years since I last wrote about this series and even longer since I did a proper post about them, although I have mentioned a couple in Recommendsday posts. Since that last series redux we’ve had an eleventh and now this week a twelfth book in the series. And I’ve also now read all of them – this is a series that I’ve read severely out of order and have picked up the ones that I’ve missed when they’ve been on offer on Kindle. So now I can give you a proper opinion on the whole series – including the latest book. And I’m going to start with the new one The Voices of the Dead.

In the latest book we’ve reached 1941 and the height of The Blitz as Josephine and her friends gather for Archie Penrose’s wedding. But as soon as the wedding is over Archie is off to Wales to help supervise the operation to move the National Gallery’s paintings to the safety of a slate mine. Josephine is also in the area on holiday in the hopes of spending some more time with Marta who is part of a film crew documenting the operation for newsreels. Also in Wales is Noel Coward who is working on his new play, which will star Margaret Rutherford as a clairvoyant. They’re all hoping for a peaceful time away from the terror of the bombings in London. But as the paintings are being moved in a roof collapses in part of the mine and reveals a body. It’s been there for decades and Archie’s superiors don’t want him to investigate just to move the paintings but that doesn’t sit right with Archie so he and Josephine start to investigate as best they can.

It’s a really good mystery – and if you haven’t read any of the series before it’s actually an OK entry point because all the characters are reintroduced at the start for the wedding and because the plot and secondary characters are fairly typical of the series. And that’s why I’ve started this post with that review of the new book. Because for me the thing that carries through the whole series is that it’s not just Josephine who is a real person being fictionalised – yes most of the people in her immediate circle are fictional (although based on real characters) the secondary characters are real people and the events that are going on are real – in this case it’s Noel Coward and Margaret Rutherford and the real life operation to move paintings to safety. In other books it’s been people like Alfred and Alma Hitchcock who adapted one of Tey’s plays. I particularly enjoyed the paintings plot because we went to Penrhyn Castle on our recent trip to Anglesey so I really appreciated the descriptions of the house which was one of the more boggling National Trust properties we have recently been to.

As I said back in that very first post about the series, they are often darker than you would expect – and this one is no different to that. But then mystery novels written in this era are often darker than you remember – or at least darker than you noticed when you read them as a child and don’t spot the subtext because you don’t understand it. Since I wrote that first series post I’ve read five more in the series – including the latest one – and they’ve all got four stars from me on Goodreads (and I finished this latest one just before the ability to do more than a full star came in) which is a sign of how much I like them.

These are very easy to get hold of – in my experience there’ll be at least one in any crime selection of even a reasonable size in a bookshop and I’m expecting this one to be in the new hardbacks section in shops too. And they’re in Kindle and Kobo too obviously. And it’s worth mentioning that Upson’s standalone Christmas mystery, The Christmas Clue, came out in paperback a couple of weeks ago too and so that should be fairly easy to get hold of as well.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Book of the Week, Christmas books, detective, historical, mystery, new releases

Book of the Week: Murder on the Royal Crescent

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As I said yesterday I started my new Christmas book reading last week and it’s only fair that this should be today’s BotW because a) it came out last week, b) it’s really good and c) it’s the follow up to D is for Death which was also a BotW. Yes that was only a pick in April and it’s a sequel so I’m breaking two of my own rules (about repeats and sequels) to post this but it was my favourite thing I read last week so I don’t care!

Cover of Murder on the Royal Crescent

It’s December 1936 and while the rest of the country is consumed with the abdication of Edward VIII, Dora Wildwood is in Bath where a death has happened on the twentieth anniversary of an earlier murder. In 1916 Daisy Palmer was found dead on Royal Crescent and now someone else is dead in front of the house where Daisy’s increasingly eccentric fiancé still lives on the Crescent. Dora discovers that the Georgian houses are a broiling mass of family rivalries and dodgy antiques dealings as well as a wall of silence about what actually happens to Daisy. Oh and there’s a massive schism between people who like the Brontes and the ones who like Austen. Can Dora work out what on earth is going on?

We are a year or more on from the events of D is for Death and this is largely set away from the London Library where that book is set and where Dora still works (when she’s not trying to set up her detective agency) so I don’t think you need to have read that book to enjoy this one, and although reading this first will spoil some of the events of the first book you definitely don’t need to have read that one to enjoy this. In my review of that first book I described it as a historical mystery romp and Dora as a delightfully quirky heroine and all of that is still true but she’s also gained a bit of maturity and experience. The mystery is good – but the portrayal of Bath is brilliant. Townson lives there and she’s made it a real character in the book which is lovely. Sometimes you read a book and the setting feels a bit generic – like it could be anywhere – but this is not one of those books. It’s not as Christmas-Christmas as some of the other festive releases, but it is Christmassy – so if you’re looking to get your festive reading underway it would be a good choice.

My copy came from NetGalley, but this one is out now in hardback and should be fairly easy to get hold of in physical copy. And of course it’s in Kindle and Kobo too.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Book previews, historical, mystery, new releases, previews

Book of the Week: The Shadows of Kensington Gore

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This is a slight cheat again this week but for a different reason than the last two weeks have been. I did read this last week – but it’s not out until next Thursday so that’s where the rule breaking occurs. But as I always say, I make the rules so I’m allowed to do what I want about them in the end. It was my favourite thing I read last week though so it totally deserves this spot.

I really enjoyed The Murder at Worlds End and so I was looking forward to this follow up – and I was not disappointed. Stephen and Miss Decima are now in London, installed in a mansion block near the Royal Albert Hall. Miss Decima is and running a detective agency from it. But all the cases she is getting are household pilfering and she’s is getting bored. Stephen is finding is feet in a new neighbourhood and is growing frustrated that he’s not as involved in the detecting as he was hoping – and that he’s running the whole household on his own and having books thrown at him when he’s not doing things as quickly as Decima wants him to. But all this changes when they go to a Suffragette meeting ahead of the Coronation and Stephen is first on the scene of a murder. This also means he’s the police’s prime suspect – and so he and Miss Decima are back on the case again.

The atmosphere of pre-Coronation London is great – and so is the portrayal of the various factions within the movement for women’s suffrage. Too often this can get flattened to just the suffragettes, but this has got the peaceful and the militant factions in the thick of it – as well as all the various movements trying to prevent women from getting the vote. It’s also got the working class – or more accurate the servants class view, all of which makes for an intriguing mystery to solve. It’s also funny – Stephen’s antics as he tries to find his place in the neighbourhood are great, as is Decima and her various foibles. The body count is fairly high – but it manages to balance the light and the shade really well. Miss Decima hasn’t changed her character since the first book and so she’s as cantankerous and difficult as ever – and the book is trying hard not to soften her into fluffy old lady, which must be a temptation given the rest of the genre.

I raced through this and I really hope that there is a third book coming because this showed that there is plenty of material for mining in London for these two.

My copy came from NetGalley and as I said it’s out on the 22nd so you can pre-order it now if you’re desperate to read it after this rave review. Here are the Kindle and Kobo links. It’a a hardback release but should be fairly easy to find in the stores when it does come out – Waterstones have a signed version for preorder which is usually a good sign for availability and I’ve seen Murder at Worlds End all over the place since it came out last year. There’s an audiobook too – which looks like it might be dual narration between Joe Jameson and Juliet Stevenson which would be fun.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, mystery, new releases

Book of the Week: A Game of Cat and Killer

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Happy Tuesday everyone. After last week’s Japanese fiction Recommendsday it just so happens that I’ve got another Japanese novel in translation today – it’s actually a new release in English and it’s got a very different feel from the ones I mentioned last week…

Yoshitaro Katayama is not an ideal candidate to be a detective: he doesn’t like heights, he’s socially awkward and he’d rather not come into contact with dead bodies. But his father was detective and it was his dying wish for his son. And so here he is. One morning he’s offer the choice of looking at some gruesome crime scene photos of a murdered young woman or going to the college she was a student at to conduct investigations. He chooses the latter, but soon there are more bodies and he has acquired a cat which belonged to one of the victims. He’s not keen on having a pet, until she starts to show an unusual level of interest in the case…

Now I know there are a lot of cozy mysteries with cats (often talking cats) in them. This is not one of those. Katayama also has a sister that he lives with and worries a lot about, and an auntie who is trying to arrange him a marriage but this is not cozy. Do not be deceived. This is a serial killer mystery which happens to have a cat. The detective is a bit hapless but the crimes he is investigating are anything but.

This originally came out in the late 1970s and is the first in a long running series by Jiro Akagawa that has only just making it into English. Considering their age they felt surprisingly current – obviously there are no mobile phones or computers but apart from that they could have been now. Of course that could be down to the choices Haydn Trowell has made in the translation. The murders were a bit on the gruesome side for what I’m used to reading, but I am interested enough in what happens to detective Katayama next that I may pick up the next one when it comes out in a few months time.

My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out today in Kindle and Kobo and all the usual formats. I have no sense of how easy (or otherwise) this will be to get in hard copy, but it’s got physical copies listed so it may be possible

Happy Reading!

Book previews, new releases, reviews

Bonus Review: Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel

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In the Miss Marple series post earlier in the month, I mentioned that there is a new Miss Marple continuation novel. It’s already out in the US but it comes out on Tuesday coming in the UK so this week I’ve got a bonus review for it because I’ve already read it.

Miss Marple and her friend Dolly Bantry are on holiday at a resort high in the Swiss Alps. Along with a companion to smooth the way for them, they are enjoying the mountain air and watching other people doing winter sports. Among the other guests at the hotel are a politician and his young wife, a blonde bombshell who may be nearing her expiration date for the movie industry and a couple of suspicious characters. When one of the guests at the hotel is found dead in an empty gondola at the top of the ski slopes, Miss Marple can’t help but start trying to work out what happened. In the chronology of the series, this comes sometime after Arthur Bantry has died, but definitely before Caribbean Mystery and I’m going to say also before The Mirror Crack’d* because if it had been after there would definitely have been mention of Marina Gregg in the face of another movie actress.

This is a really interesting continuation to write about because I think that the characters are very true to the original series but the actual writing style and elements of the plot are very different. This is told from multiple points of view and elements that are definitely closer to thrillers, including with action elements. I haven’t read any of Foley’s other novels but I’m assuming that this is her style in them – but with Agatha Christie’s characters. And I enjoyed it and thought that it worked.

I’ve been puzzling about why I liked this and didn’t like the Sophie Irwin Georgette Heyer novel and I think the difference is that Irwin has taking someone else’s characters and writing about them in her own style but they are behaving in a consistent style with what the reader would expect from them, whereas Irwin has tried to add Heyer-esque language into a book with characters and a plot of her own creation. Which I guess you could say is because Heyer didn’t repeat characters and Christie did, but recreating someone else’s characters and making them seem consistent is not easy. Jill Paton Walsh did it with her Wimsey continuations, but she had the skeleton of a novel started by Sayers to help her with the first one and although I didn’t like all of the the later developments in that series, the characters always felt true to the originals. But not all of the authors who contributed to the Miss Marple short story continuation the other year managed it for sure. So that’s a significant achievement for me.

I don’t think everyone is going to like this, but I definitely think it’s a better choice than trying to recreate Christie’s style which could feel too much like a pastiche. Presumably the choice of Foley to write it was to achieve that – following with what Sophie Hannah has done in the Poirot continuations.

This is going to be absolutely everywhere when it comes out next week and you’re going to have no trouble finding it I think the timing of it being two weeks after the new Richard Osman was definitely a deliberate choice because I think it’s going to sell to the same sort of audience – people who are looking for a known quantity to read whether it’s to read on (an autumn) holiday or as a gift book this Christmas.

Happy Reading!

*Interestingly it also references Sleeping Murder which although it was released last, it was written a long way before that and omits some of the later developments as I mentioned in the other post and I totally agree with that choice

Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

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I’m actually following up on a new release I mentioned a couple of weeks back for this week’s pick, because it really lived up to the promise of the blurb and the gorgeous cover and was a really great read.

At the start of the book Philippa is cycling to work as a university professor when she narrowly misses falling into a sinkhole as it opens up. This near miss gives her a wake up call and suddenly she doesn’t want to put up with the frustrations of her academic job any more – whether it’s the office that’s actually a cupboard or the (male) colleagues who seem to only value her for the fact they can force her to do the jobs they don’t want to. So she hands in her notice and throws her life in to chaos. Luckily she inherited her romance-author grandmother’s house (and boat) and so she moves back there to regroup. Unluckily the house is in need of some serious repair and also comes with a sitting tenant – her grandmother’s former co-writer (and cover model). As Philippa and Dylan start to navigate their awkward co-habitation situation they also get to know each other and eventually find outlines for six more novels in Philippa’s grandmothers fantasy pirate romance series, which they start to write together. But can Philippa actually find a new future outside of academia?

This has a really good slow burn romance with two characters who have a lot of issues to work through, but because Philippa has the backstop of selling the house (which is on prime ocean front land) the stakes are lower than you might expect. She does have the most awful parents that I have recently encountered in literature and I really, really wanted them to get a lot of comeuppance (more than they did get, I’m warning you). But Philippa and Dylan’s slow dance towards each other is worth putting up with the rage that her mother will generate in you (her siblings are better than her parents, mostly, but that’s not saying much). Philippa’s disillusionment with academia felt very real – as did her difficulty in letting go of her plan for her life and figuring out a new one. I think that’s very relatable for millennials especially, who graduated into the financial crisis of 2008 and feel like they’ve been trying to make their lives more secure ever since then.

And as a romance reader, I loved that Philippa’s grandmother was a romance author of the old school type and that romance novels were the answer to Philippa figuring herself out and finding love. This is a warm hug of a novel – well except for the leaking roof, and bracing sea breezes – and would make a great autumnal read as you curl up on a sofa and hide from the changing seasons. I haven’t read any of Jacqueline Firkins’ other books but I’m pretty sure I have at least one of them on the TBR so you may see that popping up on the weekly list soon too!

My copy came from NetGalley but it was an Amazon First Reads pick in August before it came out at the start of September and is now in Kindle Unlimited so if you’re in that you can get it. That does mean it’s not on Kobo at the moment, and I also don’t have much of a sense of how easy it might be to find in the shops but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

Happy Reading!

Recommendsday, reviews

Recommendsday: August Quick Reviews

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As ever, the first Wednesday of the Month is quick reviews day and I’m back with three more books I read last month that I haven’t talked about yet.

Murder-Sur-Mer by Hugh Morrison

This is the third in Morrison’s Clarice and Cliff series and sees our titular leads tying the knot and heading off on honeymoon to France. Of course crime follows them there – in the form of a murdered jewel thief in their hotel room. The French police seem to them to be making slow progress and determined to look in the wrong places so they take it upon themselves to try and solve the crime. I don’t like this series as much as the Rev Shaw mysteries but this was a light, easy read even if I had the rough outlines of the solution figured out fairly early on. I don’t know if the fact that I’ve been listening to the Miss Marple series has made me a bit fussier at the moment but that can’t be ruled out as a factor in my opinion on this one. Still I liked it the most of the books I’m writing about here today – and I’ll be keeping an eye for the next one – they’re definitely a step above the J G Colgan that I mentioned last month.

The Truth About Love by Stephanie Laurens

This is the twelfth book in Laurens’ Cynster series. I’ve read the first six and then 14th as well. This one was written 20 years ago, which probably counts as an old school romance at this point and it did feel a bit like it – that or my tastes have changed, although to be fair I did start reading historical romances of this sort in around 2008 so it’s not that old school for me! Anyway our hero is Gerrard Debbington a painter who is desperate to paint the gardens of Hellebore Hall, but the only way the owner Lord Tregonning will let him do that is if he also paints a portrait of his daugher, Jacqueline. And Jacqueline is (of course) our heroine, she’s been the target of rumour and innuendo since the disappearance of her suitor and the death of her mother, and is hoping the portrait will help clear her. And of course they fall in love but also solve the mysteries. And I was much more interested in the mystery solving than I was in the romance, but maybe that’s just me. It’s a bit gothic and a lot overblown (anyone actually believe that a portrait can reveal guilt or innocence?) but as I found it on the bookshelf at the hostel I didn’t spend anything on it and and so I can’t complain too much. That said, it was a really useful indication of how my reading tastes change and evolve – it’s the first Laurens I’ve read in some years and as I didn’t love it, I took the opportunity to clear some space on the to-read shelf by checking for any physical copies of Laurens on there and moving them to the charity shop bag!

The Murder on the Enriqueta by Molly Thynne

I read this thinking it was going to be another murder on a boat story – but although the first murder does indeed take place on a voyage from Argentina to Britain, despite what you might take from the blurb the main action happens after that boat journey in London. Chief Inspector Shand is on board ship for that murder and finds himself drawn into events in London because also on board ship is the widow of Lord Dalberry, making her way to England after the death of her husband where two young cousins of her husband encounter her. In terms of plot this is as bonkers as some of the maddest of the Girl’s Own books – I’m talking C Bernard Rutley and Rita Coutts level madness here – but it’s no where near as easy to read. I’ve read two of Thynne’s other books and enjoyed them much more than this one which I can’t really recommend.

Book of the Week, memoirs, reviews

Book of the Week: Vagabond

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As I said yesterday, it was a bit of a grim week on a lot of fronts, one of which was the celebrity death front. And although I finished this on Monday so it’s technically cheating, it feels somehow right to make Tim Curry’s memoir this week’s pick.

In case you missed the last fifty years of pop culture, Tim Curry was an actor who first rose to prominence as Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Show in a role he reprised in the movie version The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He went on to play an eclectic range of characters across his career – and if you’re a millennial he will likely have been a key figure in one of the movies or TV shows that defined your childhood – whether it is Muppet Treasure Island, Home Alone 2, Annie, The Wild Thornberries, The Worst Witch or Clue. And there are more I could have picked – he was that prolific. He had a stroke in 2012 but continued to do some voice work and occasional appearances after that.

Vagabond came out last autumn and was much awaited as Curry didn’t give a lot of interviews (although he was always great value when he did) and rarely revealed anything about his personal life. And if you’re looking for juicy scoops on that front, this is not that. He warns you right at the start he’s not talking about his love life and he sticks to that. What this is is a gallop through the rest of his life with a look at his early years it feels mostly because he thinks it helps you understand his attitude to life: his father was a navy chaplain whose job meant they moved around a lot and then died young (in his late 40s from a stroke), quite a distant relationship with his mother who didn’t understand him and a boarding school education all of which added up to a very self contained and independent adult. He does a really good job of making you feel like he’s revealing a lot about himself while actually keeping a lot back – basically a memoir on his own terms, which he sets out very clearly at the start.

I am one of those who first saw him in one of those 80s and 90s roles and then graduated to Rocky Horror as a teen and then missed out on seeing him as King Arthur in Spamalot because I was a penniless student at the wrong end of the country at the time. So I learned a lot about his career from reading the book but what I enjoyed the most about it was how much it felt like it was really in his voice. And I know I said that he didn’t give a lot of interviews, but the ones he did were memorable and of course he’s done so much voice work over the years that it is easy to imagine him saying the words as you read it – and he did read the audiobook and I can’t tell you the willpower it took not to also buy the audiobook when I had the hardback on the pile.

I’m glad that he got to tell his story on his terms – even if he wasn’t entirely sure about the whole concept as he said several times through the book. I’m annoyed at myself for the fact that it took him dying for me to bump the book to the top of the to-read pile but strangely it did feel like a good time to read it and having read all the obituaries and watched all the clips this week it was nice to read about his life in his own words – and spot where quotes had been lifted for the obits or stories that he had told in interviews popped up or were lightly referenced. But I enjoyed reading it and it’s out in paperback now and if I was running a bookshop I’d be putting it in an obvious place for people to happen across right now.

Happy Reading!

new releases, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Summer New Releases Reviews

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Happy last Wednesday of the month everyone, and for this Recommendsday I bring you some reviews of recent releases. It’s a bit of a mixed bag in terms of how much I liked them (and I left out the one that I really, really detested) but if I only ever raved about books and I kept all the stuff I didn’t like strictly to the Goodread account, if you never check that as well, in the end you might stop believing me. So here we are. And I was going to call this quick reviews, but then I realised I actually had quite a lot to say about each of them so it’s just ‘reviews now!

My Name is MacKenzie Bly by Lissa Evans*

This one is actually out tomorrow, and it’s the one that I liked the most of the three I’m talking about today. MacKenzie Bly (real name Philip Stevens) is a 14-year-old boy who doesn’t like his life much. He’s tall, he’s broad, one of his mums teaches at his school, the other is a plumber and his dad turns up at all the worst possible moments. All of this means the other kids at school have plenty of ammunition to use against him and to top it all off, his best friend has moved to New Zealand. This is his story in his words, and is blurbed as being Adrian Mole for the 21st century. I enjoyed reading this and read it very quickly but I’m unsure who the audience for it is. It’s very different from Lissa Evans’s other recent books which have all been historical fiction. It has the feel of a YA book in some ways (and the cover of one) but there are a lot of references in here that are clearly for adults – stuff that the teenage protagonist doesn’t understand or doesn’t see but that adults clearly will. It made me laugh and I enjoyed it but don’t know how like a real-current-14 year old our protagonist is – to me he felt like a teenager from the sort of era that I was a teen for (so early 00s) but with a dash of added viral videos (but not really much reference to social media or messaging among students beyond that). So it’s a retro feel book, that’s a lot of fun but which also ends very abruptly and is a bit confusing. I’m not sure who I would be buying it for – and that may be the main issue for it. But I did really enjoy it.

The One Where They Fall in Love by Cristina Wolf*

Elle is a romance editor who has watched her friends find love without any luck herself. Oliver is a reluctant medical resident who doesn’t think a relationship is in the cards for him. When Oliver moves into the apartment above Elle, complete with a dog with separation anxiety, the two of them are thrown into each other’s path. When Elle starts to dog sit Thor and they spend more time together, a connection starts to develop – but can it lead to a happily ever after? I liked the idea of this – and the start was promising, but ultimately Elle and Oliver are very different people and it was hard to see how they could make a relationship work long term, given the various obstacles in their way. It’s all pretty low stakes, but also some proper conversations between the two leads could have solved some of the issues much earlier. It’s fine while you’re reading it but it hasn’t really stuck with me – I’m writing this ten days or so after reading it because I wanted to let my thoughts percolate a little and I’m regretting that because it’s already fading away in my memory! This came out on the 11th, and I haven’t really been in a bookshop since then so I don’t know how easy this is going to be to get hold of in paperback, but it’s in all the usual ebook formats.

Henrietta by Sophie Irwin

Henrietta has been in love with Arthur since she was a child. When he went away to fight Napoleon she was a shy debutant, but now he’s back she’s determined to try and make him see her in a different light, but can she make herself over into a toast of society and attract his attention enough to notice what’s hiding under his nose? Here’s the thing: I really like Georgette Heyer – I have read all of her Regency romances and re-read my favourites time and time again. I have also read Sophie Irwin’s other books, so I was excited and interested to see what a new “official Georgette Heyer” novel meant. Unfortunately this didn’t work for me on a couple of levels. Now I appreciate that my summary sounds simple, but it’s really not. There are at least two other major story lines and there is just too much plot going on here – which is something that I have found with other Sophie Irwin books but which has sometimes been fine, but in this means there is just too much going on and that the ending(s) feel very rushed. It also felt like it was trying to include plot ideas from as many different Heyers as possible but it didn’t really hang together very well – or feel particularly consistent. In terms of the writing style, it felt like it was trying to create a Heyer like feel by just dropping as many words and phrases from Heyer as possible rather than actually trying to emulate the writing style. So in short it felt like a Sophie Irwin (and all the problems often I have with that) but with added Heyer-vocab. Not a success for me sadly. This one came out two weeks ago too and see my point above about lack of bookshop visits since but given it’s official status and hardcover release, I suspect it’s going to be easy to find if you want to see if you agree with me or not.

That’s your lot today – Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: A Wedding Planner’s Guide to Stealing the Bride

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Happy Tuesday and my pick today is back to romance and it is one of the new releases that I read last week and there’s another coming up tomorrow in the quick reviews too.

Kalpana is planning the wedding of her dreams, or at least the wedding of her fiancé’s dreams. Marcus is a literary fiction superstar and Kalpana is a romance writer. He’s from old money and she’s the third generation of her family born in the UK but they’re in Sri Lanka with their wedding planner Sampath to plan the big traditional Sri Lankan wedding that Marcus wants – even though Kalpana isn’t sure those traditions feel right for her. Sampath is a great listener – and seems to hear what Kapana wants in a way that Marcus seems not to be.

I read it across less than twenty four hours over the weekend and it was a real treat. As you can tell from the title this is a love triangle type situation, but I don’t think this is going to ping anyone’s cheating monitor for reasons that I can’t really explain without it being a spoiler. As well as the romance, Charika is exploring feelings of identity and culture and also looking at the place of romance and commercial fiction in the bookish infrastructure all of which is right up my street. It also really made me want to visit Sri Lanka – it paints such a vivid picture of the future places they visit and the potential wedding venues.

My copy came from NetGalley but this came out last week and I’m not sure how easy the paperback will be to find but it’s on Kindle and Kobo for £1.99 at the moment as are some of Charika’s previous novels some of which I’ve written about here like Picture Perfect and Knowing Me, Knowing You.

Happy Reading!