Category: new releases

Book of the Week, holiday reading, new releases, romance

Book of the Week: The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts

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Such an easy decision for BotW this week – I absolutely loved Annie Darling’s Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts.  It is so much fun, and ticked so many of my book buttons.

Posy Morland loves her job at Bookends – a crumbling bookshop tucked away in a Bloomsbury mews.  But when the shop’s owner, Lavinia, dies and leaves the shop to Posy her life is turned upside down.  Posy’s got  lots of plans to turn the ailing bookshop around, but she’s also got to contend with Lavinia’s autocratic grandson Sebastian – nicknamed The Rudest Man in London by one of the papers, and seemingly searching for the national title.  With her friends and co-workers to help her, can Posy turn the shop around as well as dealing with Sebastian’s machinations?   And why is she having lurid fantasies?

Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts proof copy.
  Isn’t my proof copy gorgeous? I do love a good cover – and the proper cover looks lovely too.

The back of my proof copy says it’s for fans of Georgette Heyer (waves) and Jenny Colgan (waves) and for people who’ve dreamed of opening their own bookshops (falls over waving so hard) and I would totally agree.  Posy is a great heroine – she’s likeable, a little bit damaged and totally relatable.  It was great fun reading about her figuring out what to do with the bookshop and trying to stand up to Sebastian.  It’s also crammed full of gems for the romance reader – whether it’s obvious ones (like name checks for historical romance authors) or more subtle ones (not telling, find them yourself).

This whistles along at a tremendous pace, with twists and turns and heaving bosoms in empire line gowns (you’ll understand if you read it).  I was cross it was over so quickly – because I could have spent another 200 pages with Posy and her band of misfits at the  bookshop and as there’s an ad at the end for a sequel, my wish may yet come true.  The back of my advance copy also has the author’s top five novels in it which include Heyer’s Regency Buck – which I adore – Pride and Prejudice (ditto) and a Courtney Milan.  What’s not to love.  And on top of that it has a bookshop list which includes not one but TWO name checks for my beloved Chalet School so basically I think Annie Darling and I would really get on.

I got sent an advanced copy by a publicist who I chat to on Twitter – who had spotted that I love Georgette Heyer.  It’s not out in paperback yet (August 25th) – but it is out in Kindle (£2.99 at time of writing!) and you can pre-order the paperback on Amazon and Waterstones and Foyles will email you when they get it in stock.  I suspect as it’s published by Harper it may make it to the supermarkets too.  I would’ve saved my ravings for closer to the time, but as the Kindle is out and I think that this would make a great beach read I thought I’d alert you all now. Go forth and read it!

American imports, Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: The Tumbling Turner Sisters

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Sometimes I sit for ages and think about what I’m going to pick for my Book of the Week, but sometimes I just know.  This week is one of the latter – by the time I was halfway through The Tumbling Turner Sisters I was fairly sure it was going to be this week’s pick. And that was on Tuesday.  Sure enough, here it is.

It’s 1919 and Gert, Winnie, Kit and Nell end up performing a vaudeville gymnastics act to try and make ends meet after their father injures his hand and is unable to work as a boot-stitcher.  As they travel around the US they experience the highs and lows of show business, make new friends, encounter prejudice and the seedier side of life.  Told by Winnie and Gert, you see them grow up as well as their differing perspectives on life on tour.

I love historical novels and I’m always looking for new authors who write good ones.  I’ve never read any of Juliette Fay’s books before – although reading the blurbs for them on Goodreads, this looks like it’s not precisely like any of her previous books anyway. This reminded me in some ways of Laurie Graham – who I love – it’s not laugh out loud funny as her characters often are, but there’s a similar tone and slightly sardonic world view.

I  really enjoyed this and although I had a few reservations about the end – which I won’t go into here because spoilers – they weren’t enough to annoy me and drive my overall impression of the book down.  I’ll be looking out for more from Juliette Fay – and maybe working my way through some of her back catalogue too.

You can get The Tumbling Turner Sisters from Amazon – but it’s only in hardcover and it’s not on Kindle at the moment, so I suspect it’s an American import.  Sorry. I try not to do this, but I really did enjoy this so much I wanted to write about it.  I’ll try and pick something easy to find next week!

 

Book of the Week, crime, new releases

Book of the Week: The White Cottage Mystery

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We’re back in classic crime territory for the week’s BotW – although it’s a bit of a cheat as this is a reissue of whole book – Margery Allingham’s The White Cottage Mystery – but it is excellent and it gives me a great chance to talk about an author who I think is a bit neglected.

This is a tricksy and intriguing standalone mystery which sees a policeman and his son trying to solve the murder of a particularly nasty neighbour. Jerry happens upon the scene of the crime and soon has his Scotland Yard detective father involved.  This was originally a serialised book (just like some of Harriet Vane’s novels in my beloved Peter Wimsey) and you can really tell from the pacing and multiple cliffhangers. There is a clever drip feed of clues which method you turning the pages, and although I had suspicions about the culprit, it wasn’t until quite late on that I worked it all out.

This was my first non-Campion Allingham and it didn’t disappoint. I usually prefer my detective books to be part of a series (I prefer Miss Marple and Poirot to Christie’s other books) but this was a pleasant surprise. But then it’s not that different in style to the Campion series, you could almost swap the leads for Albert and his son and it would nearly work (except that Albert is not a cop) and that totally works for me! In case you haven’t met Allingham’s most famous creation,  Albert Campion is the younger scion of a noble family, who uses an assumed name and solves mysteries with the help of his faithful manservant and police officer friend. Sound familiar? Well that’s because it supposedly started as a Lord Peter Wimsey parody, but developed into much, much more (an BBC ran for much longer). Albert’s Bunter equivalent is a reformed (ish) criminal and Campion end up being much older than Peter.  They’re also more adventure stories than detective, most of the time you don’t have a chance of working out the solution to Campion’s cases but they’re such great fun you don’t care.

I discovered Margery Allingham when I was living in Essex – where she still had a large presence in their libraries as a local author, even though she’d been dead 40 years at that point. I devoured as many of them as I could lay my hands on, and although the series has its ups and downs, I defy you not to like them if you’re a fan of Wimsey, Marple and Poirot or even adventure stories like Amelia Peabody or Vicky Bliss. It’s not the first one, but start with Sweet Danger and I defy you not to get hooked.

My copy of The White Cottage Mystery can via NetGalley, but you can buy it in paperback from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones  or on Kindle. You should also be able to find new or secondhand copies of Albert Campion too.   Don’t blame me for the spending spree that will ensue though…

Book of the Week, cozy crime, detective, new releases

Book of the Week: Death of a Nobody

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The Fahrenheit Book Club subscription comes up trumps again – this time with Derek Farrell’s Death of a Nobody – the second book in the Danny Bird series.  You may remember me raving about Death of a Diva in my Easter Recommendations post but as it didn’t get a BotW then, it means I can do this one now – Hurrah.

So, to fill you in.  Danny Bird runs a pub in South London.  He hopes it’s an up and coming gastro pub, after his attempt to turn it into a gay bar resulted in a corpse.  Sadly he’s being hampered the fact that the pub’s owned by a mobster, who has also foisted an unwilling and unpaid extra employee on him. On top of this they’ve got a post-funeral do to cater for a local girl turned Lady.  Danny’s already been asked to investigate some poison pen letters when a corpse turns up in the loo.  Soon he, Lady Caroline, the Asbo Twins and the gang are in the midst of a murder mystery in high(ish) society.

What I really like about these books is the humour.  It’s snarky and caustic and everyone gets some great zingers.  My favourite in this one is possible when Caz describes Danny as “Poirot on poppers” – which made me attract attention to myself on the train by snorting with laughter.  It’s not graphic or violent – the gore level is pretty much cozy crime – but this is much more fun and sly than stories about bakers or home decorators or country policemen.  Imagine a Gay Stephanie Plum was running a pub instead of chasing criminals, but kept stumbling across bodies and you’re sort of kind of half way there.  Maybe.

And the supporting cast are a hoot too. The dynamic between the pub’s workers is a joy – and the gang have everything you need to make you laugh – a posh bird, the Asbo twins (who do exactly what they say on the tin), a hard boiled bar managed and a gangster’s spoilt little princess with her own criminal tendencies.  If that doesn’t sell it to you I don’t know what will.

Get your copy from Kindle or if you like the sound of it and Death of a Diva and the Sam Jones series, then you might want to look at the Fahrenheit Press Book Club – for a stream of crime fiction appearing through your inbox through the year.

Book of the Week, Classics, new releases, women's fiction

Book of the Week: Northbridge Rectory

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A tricky choice for BotW this week – I loved the Ben Aaronovitch that I read last week, but it is the 5th in the series (not including comics) and you really should read them in order.  And I already wrote about the first book Rivers of London in a previous BotW post 11 months ago and I recommended it in one of the Christmas Gift guides.  So it felt a little overkill (so just go buy the first one).  But the latest Angela Thirkell release from Virago was a lot of fun – even if it wasn’t my favourite of hers – but that bar is pretty high!

Northbridge Rectory is the tenth of Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels – they started in the 1930s and by this point we’ve reached the war years.  There are officers billeted at the Rectory, where Mrs Villars is struggling to adapt to life as a Rector’s wife rather than a Headmistress’s wife.  There are some transferable skills though…  Northbridge’s unmarried ladies, widowed ladies and officious ladies are all out in force – taking control of the war effort and trying to assert their authority over each other as best they can.

Thirkell excels in creating believable grotesques – her books fill a similar hole for me as the Mapp and Lucia ones, except that in a Barsetshire novel they are the side dish not the main course.  In this one we get a truly terrible officer’s wife – who has not idea how horrible she is, an old maid who likes to suffer and who has been cultivating a spineless writer who has his own issues,  a vicar who is trying to escape the attentions of his elderly lady parishoners and an officer who doesn’t realise that he’s talking himself into a transfer.

A trip to Barsetshire is always fun and there are some familiar faces here too.  I still think that Summer Half is my favourite – closely followed by High Rising and Pomfret Towers.  I’m thrilled that Virago are reissuing them – even if I’m a little bit annoyed that some of them are e-book only because I wanted a matching set in paperback.  Get your copy from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones or if you don’t want the paperbacks you can get the Kindle edition.  I’m off to make puppy dog eyes at Before Lunch and try to resist breaking the book-buying embargo.

Book of the Week, books, children's books, detective, new releases

Book of the Week: Mystery and Mayhem

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I had real problems chosing my BotW this week – a fair few things that I liked, but several were sequels where you really need to have read the preceeding book.  So I went left field and I’m going for Mystery and Mayhem – an anthology of middle grade mystery stories.

Mystery and Mayhem
Mystery and Mayhem in the wild! (ie a bookshop)

Now I was attracted to this because it has stories from Robin Stevens and Katherine Woodfine who I’ve read and really liked recently.  But there are lots of stories to like here.  They’re not all historical – some are set right here and now – they’re not all tie-ins to other books (and even if they are you don’t need to have read the novels they’re linked to), there’s all types of heroes and all types of mysteries.

I enjoyed them all – and even worked out who had done it a fair few times, which wasn’t a problem, because the introduction basically tells you to try and figure it out for yourself!  I’ve also got a big old list of authors to go find more stories by now, but only once the pile is shorter obviously.

If you’re a grown up who likes kids books still (aka my kind of person) then this will fill an afternoon nicely.  If you have a upper primary school age kid (aka middle-grader) who has read some Wells and Wong or some Clockwork Sparrow and is looking for something else to try, this would be a good place to find some ideas.  Equally if you’re desperate for your under 11 to get into murder mysteries but you think they’re too young for Agatha Christie (they probably are, I got the heebie jeebies from reading Miss Marple and Poirot in year 6) then this would really work really well for them too.

My copy came from NetGalley, but I’m hoping this is going to be everywhere – I know it’s in Waterstones because that’s where I took my photo – but here’s the link for Amazon, Kindle and Foyles as well.  Go forth and read crime for kids!

Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: Somewhere Inside of Happy

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A paperback copy of Somewhere Inside of Happy
This week’s attempt at an artistic photo has floorboards and sheepskin

There were two strong contenders for this week’s BotW crown – the latest Daisy Dalrymple mystery (which I’ve only just got around to) and Somewhere Inside of Happy, but as Anna McPartlin’s latest was released last week (I was lucky enough to be sent an copy in advance) and I really did love it, the funky yellow book takes home the prize.

Somewhere Inside of Happy starts with Maisie Brennan standing on a podium, about to address an audience on the twentieth anniversary of her son. Then we go back in time to find out what happened to her beloved Jeremy, as well as what her life was like before he disappeared.

You may remember that The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes reduced me to tears on a train, so this time I took precautions while reading this – no public transport.  However it did leave me in tears (subtly I hope) in my youth hostel dorm room as I finished it.  This is a tear-jerker in the very best sense.  You go into this knowing that Jeremy is dead – it’s on the back cover – but you desperately don’t want it to be true.  Watching how the story unfolds is a total rollercoaster as you get to know the characters and their backstory and their close family unit.  I was alternately desperate to know what had happened to Jeremy and desperate not to know because once you know then he is definitely dead and the family will never be the same again.

But don’t go thinking that this book is a downer. It’s not. It is funny and warm and life affirming. It shows the power of love and what people can achieve even in the face of great adversity. It shows the importance of family – whether it’s the one you’re born with or one you find and make for yourself. I may have an aversion to sad books and be devastated that Jeremy died, but I’m so glad I read it and I know I’m going to be recommending it to so many people. It’d make a great holiday read – as long as you have some big sunglasses to hide your tears behind!

Get your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Foyles – but I’d expect this to be front and centre in the supermarkets and WH Smith stores – on on Kindle or Kobo.

Book of the Week, Children's books, detective, new releases

Book of the Week: Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection

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Oh I do love a good children’s detective yarn – and I had two to pick from when I was selecting my BotW this week.  I went with Julia Lee’s latest – because it’s out on Thursday and doesn’t feature any murder – so I think I can give it to my 7-year-old niece who has the right reading age, but who can’t cope with too much peril!

Nancy Parker's Diary of Detection
Perfect reading for the train to work ahead of a nightshift!

Nancy Parker is 14 and has just left school.  She gets her first job – as a housemaid to the  rather glamorous Mrs Bryce. It’s not her dream job (who dreams of cleaning at 14!), but its more exciting than she expects as soon the whole household is living in a rented house at the seaside.  There are parties, talk of movie-making, a reputed air-ace but also a cook who seems to be hiding a secret, a string of burglaries and chores – lots of chores.  Nancy teams up with two other children from the neighbourhood to try and work out what is going on.

The book made up of a combination of extracts from Nancy’s journal (given to her as a leaving gift by her school teacher) and a third person narrative – which covers what the other children are up to.  It’s fun, engaging and fast-paced.  As someone who loved all of Enid Blyton’s mystery series (but particularly the Five Findouters) this really worked for me and filled that gap.  And unlike those Blyton stories, this books shows the range of experiences in the 1920s – Nancy would only have appeared in one of those as the maid providing the picnics for the other children.  And there’s also nice nods to the other realities of the 1920s like shortages of men for women to marry and women having to give up their jobs to returning soldiers.

As an adult, I figured out what Mrs Bryce was up to quite early on – but that’s because I’ve read a lot of the grown-up versions of this sort of story, but I think for a young reader it would be a fun, thrilling and non-threatening mystery.  I love Robin Steven’s Wells and Wong series and also enjoyed the second book in Katherine Woodfine’s Clockwork Sparrowbook last week (the other BotW contender) but they are definitely a level up from this in the scares and peril – which isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean that you need to be  bit more mature to be able to cope with them.  I’m desperate to give my niece Murder Most Unladylike – but murder is quite a big deal for a 7-year old – at 10 I was terrified by some of the Miss Marples*.   But Nancy Parker’s adventure feels like a new equivalent of a Secret Seven or a Famous Five – which is A Very Good Thing.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance proof – but you can get your copy from Amazon, Kindle, Waterstones or Foyles.  I don’t know if it’ll be in the supermarkets – but it feels like it might as the Katherine Woodfine was.  Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, cozy crime, new releases

Book of the Week: Murder on the Half Shell

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This is a strange BotW post for me to write – as there were two other books that nearly beat The Murder Quadrille last week, and nothing that I liked as much as them this week.  But I have a rule about not carrying over picks that weren’t used in a previous week.  So Shawn Reilly Simmons’s Murder on the Half Shell gets the nod – but I enjoyed it more this paragraph implies.  Trust me, keep reading!

Murder on the Half Shell is the second book in The Red Carpet Catering Mysteries. The plot: Penelope Sutherland runs a catering company that works on film sets, she’s on an island in Florida catering a movie – but it’s not all plain sailing.  The director is difficult, the leading lady has a seafood allergy and it is hot, really hot.  Then two of the waitresses she’s been using go missing after a crew party and Penelope’s former culinary school instructor turned celebrity chef is the prime suspect.  But she’s sure he didn’t do it and starts to look into it herself.

Food-related cozies are such a massive trend at the moment.  There’s a lot of cupcakes, bakers and coffee shops and so a catering company is a nice variant.  One of the problems I often have with cozy series is that there’s a lot of murder going on in a very small area.  I’m not sure how long a real cake shop/coffee shop/bakery would last if bodies kept turning up outside them and that does sometimes affect how I feel about a series as it goes on – depending obviously on how the author handles it.  But the location catering idea means that there’s potential for the series to move around a bit.  This of course makes it a little harder to maintain a large gang of supporting characters, but it does stop the Cabot Cove effect.  The flipside is that with location moving around does it does mean that the murders might start to seem to be following the lead character around – the Jessica Fletcher effect.  But there are ways and means of dealing with all of these issues – and we’ll see how Red Carpet Catering copes if the series continues.

Penelope is one of the more appealing heroines I’ve recently read in the genre too.  She’s not too stupid to live (or at least not often), she’s not too obviously encroaching on police territory in a way that would get her arrested and she still manages to spend enough time at her business (or have staff manning it) that you can see that she’d stay solvent.  I guess I’m trying to say that Murder on the Half Shell has a good premise, lead character and is solidly executed.  I did think that some of the set-up and diversionary tactics were a little heavy-handed at times – the “obvious suspect” evidence particularly – but it wasn’t enough to annoy me.  It’s not as humourous as my favourite books in the genre, but again, that’s not really a problem if the mystery is interesting – and this one is.

Murder on the Half Shell was a perfectly nice way to spend a couple of train journeys – my copy came from NetGalley and I liked it enough to go back and get the first book in the series from there too.  If you fancy dipping your toe in the world of cozy crime on location, you can pick it up on Kindle (for £1.99 at time of writing).

Happy crime reading!

 

Book of the Week, fiction, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: The Glittering Art of Falling Apart

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This was a tough choice.  A really tough choice.  I had two contenders for BotW this week and it was so hard to decide.  In the end I went for Ilana Fox’s The Glittering Art of Falling Apart – as comes out on February 11th.  I’m not telling you what my other option was, because it’s part of a series and can’t help but feel that a blog post may come on it further down the line…

The Glittering Art of Falling Apart is a timeslip novel set in the 1980s and the present day.  And there’s a country house involved. And as regular readers will know, this is just the sort of thing that I love.  The present day heroine is Cassie – obsessed with trying to keep the abandoned Beaufont Hall in the family, despite her mother’s reluctance to talk about her childhood there.  Tenancious Cassie wants to know more.  Back in the 1980s, Eliza is breaking free from her family for the bright lights and glamour of Soho.  But will it bring her the future that she craves or is the price to heavy?

If you’ve read a few timeslip type novels you will probably have a few ideas about where this story is going (I certainly did), but this is so well put together, that it doesn’t matter.  Often in books like this a location is a character in the book – I was expecting Beaufont Hall to take that role, but actually it’s Soho that is the start location in The Glittering Art of Falling Apart.  Ilana Fox paints such a vivid picture of this patch of London in the 1980s you can almost smell it.  And there’s also a really clever use of music to help create the atmosphere as Eliza tries to make her mark on Soho.  I had OMD’s Enola Gay stuck in my head for two days but the lovely people at Orion have pointed me at the playlist that Fox has put together for the book which has given me some ideas for a bit more variety!

I haven’t read any of Ilana Fox’s novels before, but from reading the descriptions of them it seems like this may be a bit of a shift.  If you like books like Harriet Evans A Place for Us or Rosanna Ley’s The Saffron Trail, this may be the book for you.  My copy came from NetGalley*, but I think this should be fairly widely available when it comes out – it feels like it might be the sort of book that goes into the supermarkets (and I hope it does) – but here are some links if you want to pre-order (or buy if you’re reading on Thursday or later) Amazon, Foyles, Waterstones, Kindle and Kobo.

One final note – at time of writing this, I spotted previous BotW The Astronaut Wives Club on a deal on Kobo for 99p – which is a total bargain – and Kindle seem to be price matching it. Go forth and purchase!

*And this seems like a good point to remind everyone of my standard disclaimer –  I review everything I read over on Goodreads but I only recommend stuff here that I genuinely like. The books I read are a mixture of books that I’ve purchased myself, books that I’ve been given and e-proofs via NetGalley.  I try to acknowledge where the books that I review here come from in the interests of transparency, but being given a book for free doesn’t influence the review that I give it – I’m always honest about my thoughts.