The latest book in Simon Brett’s Mrs Pargeter series is out today, and as I read it when I was on holiday the other week, I have a bonus review for you today!
Mrs Pargeter’s Past is the tenth book featuring the widow of Mr Pargeter, who definitely wasn’t one of the biggest crooks in Essex. This time out Mrs P is coming to the assistance of one of her husband’s former associates who has got himself into a touch of trouble because of his gambling problem. This leads us to some more of Mrs Pargeter’s backstory because the nasty characters who Short Head is entangled with are some of the same nasty customers that Mr P had some run ins with. Not that Mrs P knows about that.
I really enjoyed this – Mrs P and her deliberate refusal to acknowledge her husband’s past while making extensive use of his little black book of contacts will never not be funny to me, and in this one Simon Brett has found a way to bring in lots of the regular assistants in their various guises to help out with the mystery. I said when I wrote Major Bricket and the Circus Corpse that Mrs P is at the least realistic end of the contemporary-set Brett oeuvre and it does push on that, but it’s so funny and wry and I have a history with the characters that means that I don’t mind it really at all. Possibly not the place to start your adventures with Mrs P, but if you’ve already enjoy any of the books in the series I think it’ll work for you. I’m still hoping for another Charles Paris though.
Lets just take a moment for the fact that my pick this week is a book that came out last week so I am actually topical and sort of on time for once. Lets mark it, because it happens less often than it ought to, considering the number of advance copies I have of things!
I Shop, Therefore I Am is Mary Portas’s second memoir – I haven’t read the first, but I think this picks up where the first one ends – with Mary starting a new job in charge of window displays at Harvey Nichols. During her time there (which starts in the late 1980s), it transformed from a department store somewhere mostly patronised by older ladies from the Home Counties and in the shadow of their neighbour down the road Harrods, to a headline making store at the cutting edge of the fashion industry.
I grew up watching Absolutely Fabulous (not quite when if first came out, but not *that* long after that) and part of the joy of reading this is getting to see the impact that that show had on the store. But it’s also fascinating to see the mechanics of how the shop worked at a time which (in hindsight) was basically the heyday of the high street. I worked in retail for my first Saturday job was in a clothing store, but the behind the scenes of that was nothing like this – I was at a much lower level but also the clientele was very, very different. I also really liked Mary Portas’s writing style and her voice. She balances the day to day of what she was doing with fun gossipy insights into high fashion and celebrity. And she also seems incredibly normal and down to earth with it that it’s easy to forget that she was moving in really high powered circles until she suddenly mentions how upset they were when Princess Diana died because they all saw her in the store all the time, or when she gets Naomi Campbell to do her instore fashion show.
This is a really good read that would work whether you remember the time that Mary is talking about or not, but I think you’ll get different things out of it depending on whether you remember the time before internet shopping or not! It would also be a great Christmas book for someone who is interested in fashion.
My copy came from NetGalley, but it came out last week and I’m expecting to see it in all the bookshops ahead of the festive rush, especially because it made a bunch of the anticipated book lists earlier in the year. And of course it’s also in Kindle and Kobo.
I mean, I’d be shocked if any of you are surprised by today’s pick if you saw yesterday’s reading list, because I am somewhat predictable BUT this really lived up to the hype and is worth reading.
Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York is a joint biography of Prince Andrew, Duke of York and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. It’s written by Andrew Lownie, whose previous book was The Traitor King (which I also read on a holiday!) but has also written about The Mountbattens and Guy Burges. Lownie says in the introduction that he asked the Duke and Duchess to participate in the book – who then tried to prevent the book from happening. He says he approached more than three thousand people as part of the process of writing this book, of whom only around a tenth responded. All of which is to say that he wants you to know that he’s really tried to get the whole picture about the couple. It’s a joint biography but it’s also a look at the way that the couple remain incredibly intertwined nearly 20 years after their divorce. Andrew of course was forced to retire from public life after his disastrous Newsnight interview in 2019, where he tried (and failed) to answer questions about his relationship with the paedophile former financier Jeffry Epstein.
Now you may have seen the headlines generated first by the serialisation ahead of publication, and then the think pieces afterwards about what it means for the future of the couple. Or of course the headlines this week when Sarah Ferguson was dropped by a series of charities after an email from her to Epstein emerged from after the time when she said she had cut all contact with him. And you may think that given all that, what is the point of reading the book, surely all the best bits are already out there.
Well. Yes, the biggest revelations are already out there, but I think reading the book really brings home the scale and volume of it all. And although a lot of the focus of scandal in recent years has been on him (and indeed the serialisation headlines), her behaviour is worth reading about too – according to this she’s a charming people person and great sales person, locked in a cycle of spending, debt and then grift and deals to try and bring it round to a point where she then repeats the pattern.
In The Traitor King, Lownie made a persuasive case that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were active and willing participants in the Nazi intrigues that surrounded them as part of a concerted effort to benefit themselves and improve their positions and I think it changed significantly the way that the couple are viewed. This isn’t changing the way that the Duke of York is perceived – it’s putting all the pieces together and adding in the background information to really cement the idea that he’s up to his neck in scandals around sex and money. And between the two of them – in Lownie’s telling – they present a big challenge for the British monarchy to deal with at a time when there are less and less “working” Royals and also perhaps less public fondness for the institution as a whole.
I bought my copy of Entitled at the airport but you should be able to get this basically everywhere – as long as they haven’t run out of copies. And at Birmingham last week, they only had copies in one of the bookshops (and as I said on Saturday I didn’t manage to get it in any of my pictures!) and not many of them. But I’ve seen it in any bookshop of any size that I’ve been into since early August, and it’s obviously in Kindle and Kobo and audiobook too – although those e-versions have already had a edit, which is a good reminder to us all that ebook files are changeable, and your hard copies are not – once you’ve bought the original version I mean!
It’s been more than a month since I picked a murder mystery for book of the week. Can you believe it? I can’t – and even when I went back and checked I still sort of didn’t believe it. But it’s true, so who says there’s no variety in my reading. And there’s more murder mysteries coming tomorrow in the Quick Reviews, but first let’s talk about The Last Supper.
Prudence Bulstrode is a retired TV chef. But when one of her former rivals is found dead in the garden of a house where she was catering a shooting weekend, Prudence is called in to replace her. Farleigh Manor is notorious for an unsolved murder from a century ago, but when Prudence arrives she is soon convinced that Deirdre’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but murder. And while her granddaughter, who she brought along to keep her out of getting into (even more) trouble starts investigating the old murder, Prudence sets out to solve the new one.
Rosemary Shrager is a chef who has been a semi regular on British TV for about 20 years now and before that she ran her own catering company, so the setting for this falls very much into her area of expertise and it shows. I personally have never been on a shooting weekend, but it very much felt like she had and all is those details really worked. I also found this quite humorous – with the tension and generation gap between Prudence and Suki, but couldn’t work whether that was deliberate or not. But does it matter if it was or wasn’t? The only disappointment to me was the eventual solution to the murder, which without giving spoilers about what precisely happened, I didn’t quite feel like the reader had all of the pieces for it to work as well as I wanted it to.
But it was a fun read that I finished in an afternoon and evening and I will definitely keep an eye out for the sequel (there are two now) to see if the humour was deliberate!
I bought my copy of The Last Supper secondhand and I’ve seen it in the shops fairly regularly. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
It’s Tuesday and I’m using this week’s BotW to report back in on the new Sarah Adler, which came out back at the end of June, but which I bought in paperback which hampered my reading of it what with having started it right before I went to Ghana.
Quentin and Nina were best friends when they were at school, right up until they weren’t. But now they’re both back in their home town for the summer and living next door to each other again. Nina was expecting to be moving in with her boyfriend and getting ready for the new term as a professor. Instead she’s single, homeless and jobless. Quentin is back from Europe and also newly single and suggests resurrecting the treasure hunt that that they were trying to solve that last summer when they fell out. Surely after nearly two decades they can figure out what went wrong that summer – in the hunt and between the two of them?
Is it a second chance romance if they weren’t ever really together the first time and they just had massive crushes on each other? Because that is what we have here. It should also be noted that I absolutely loved Mrs Nash’s Ashes, and really liked Happy Medium despite the presence of ghosts and fake mediums. This is making the hat trick of BotWs for Adler’s first three novels but I liked this the least. But that’s because it turns out two of the main things it’s doing are not really my favourite tropes: this has got an incredibly oblivious heroine with anxiety problems that make me stressed and the two of them need to use their words more. If they had done that then they wouldn’t be in the mess they are and I wouldn’t find it so stressful to read and could probably deal with the cringey bits of their treasure hunt better.
But I’m still recommending it because I know that this is very much a me thing and I know other people are going to really love this. Yes I’m hoping adler’s next one goes back towards the vibes of Mrs Nash’s Ashes and gives more sunshine-but-quirky but given where we are in romance at the moment with a lot of college age pairings and early 20s heroines who are learning to adult I will still take it. Because that’s not where I am in my reading life at the moment and you just need to look at my post from The Works on Saturday to start seeing why that’s a problem right now!
I’ve got this in paperback so I’m hoping it will be one of my easier picks to get hold of and of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too for £2.99 at the moment (but who knows how long that will last given that it’s nearly the end of the month.
The first book featuring Sally Smith’s barrister and (very) reluctant detective Gabriel Ward was a BotW back in April and as the sequel is out today and I read it as soon as I could after finishing that first one, today I have a bonus review of it for you.
We rejoin Gabriel in the run up to Christmas 1901 where he is about to tackle a difficult libel case, representing an actress who says that a tabloid has impugned her reputation. But then a mummified hand is delivered to the Temple’s treasurer and Gabriel is once again pressed into service to try and find out what is happening without inviting the police into the Inner Temple. And as more body parts arrive – including one with a fatal consequence – it becomes clear that someone has got a grudge against the Inner Temple itself.
Sally Smith has come up with another twisty and intriguing mystery and has also continued to build out the world that she created in the first book. Gabriel’s world and circle continues to expand, and his cloistered and sheltered life is a great device to enable her to explain the background to things and the rules of the world without it feeling like an info dump. And Gabriel’s growing friendship with Constable Wright makes for a great unlikely duo who actually compliment each other really well.
I would have read another one of these straight away had that been an option, so the sooner Sally Smith can write a third one the better – and hopefully enough people will buy this to get in on our shelves this time next year. My copy came from NetGalley, but my paperback copy of the first book came from a bookshop so I’m hoping this one will be findable in stores too. I’ll certainly be looking out for it. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too.
It’s Tuesday and I’m back with another murder mystery for my book of the Week pick. And it’s a wintery one despite the fact that it’s a heatwave here. Does reading a book about cold weather make you feel better or worse in situations about this? Who knows. Anyway.
The set up here is that Torben Helle and a group of his university friends have been invited for a reunion by the most successful of their group, a man who because super rich after his invention took off. They haven’t really spent time together as a group in the ten years since they graduated but in snowy Northumbria they reassemble. The morning after their arrival they are snowed in and their host is dead in his bed. One of them must of done it – but who? Torben and his knowledge of Golden Age murder mysteries (and his closest friends in the group) set out to solve the crime.
As we all know at this point, I love a murder mystery – and I especially love a country house murder mystery so this was right up my street. The pacing is a little slow, but I liked the characters and the idea of a group of previously close friends brought back together. I saw a few of the twists coming, but I was ultimately pretty satisfied with the way that it all worked out. And I loved all the references to classic murder mysteries – because of course loads of them were books that I’ve read (some of them read multiple times!).
My copy came via NetGalley (yes, I know, I know, I know) but it’s out now in Kindle and Kobo. I’ve seen the sequel in the shops and would definitely give it a read to see if the pacing improves when there isn’t so much heavy lifting to do in the set up.
For this week’s pick I’m reporting back in with some good news: the new Vinyl Detective is pretty good.
The set up is this: the granddaughter of an Italian film music composer is trying to reissue his music. But because he was suspected of carrying out a murder, some of his masters were destroyed and records themselves are somewhat hard to find. So she enlists the Vinyl Detective to try and track down the rarest of them all for her – the one for the movie where the murder happened. Oh and if he can clear her grandfathers name that would be great. But trying to stop her are the grandchildren of the murder victim…
You may remember that I was a little trepidatious about this one, because I didn’t love the last book in the series. But this was a really good read. It’s got a good mystery, a real sense of the musical genre it’s tackling and lots of food. Plus the extended gang is very much in evidence if you have read the other books in the series. Plus as a bonus for me, there’s lots of action in and around Barnes and Richmond, which are both places that I have stayed in a fair bit in my efforts to avoid the long commute back and forth to London at various points.
I’m going to say this will work best if you’ve read at least some of the others in the series, but it’s also an excuse to post the shot of them all here and to comment on the fact that this book’s cover animal is a dog. You’re welcome. I’ve already seen this in the shops so in should be relatively easy to get hold of in paperback as well as in all the usual digital formats.
Happy Tuesday everyone. The weather here in the UK is distinctly summery, and I’ve started to one again think about my lack of a summer jacket. But of course as we have a bank holiday coming on Monday, this will not last, and we will soon be plunged into rain and misery again. But I’m enjoying it while I can. Today’s pick has got what I would call strong autumnal vibes – but it was the perfect book for what I needed last week, which was comforting, low angst reading.
Viv has spent her adult life as a barbarian bounty hunter, but as we meet her at the start of Legends and Lattes, she is hanging up her sword. She’s got a plan for a new life and has just finished the last mission she needs to do to be ready to carry it out. And so she leaves her crew behind her and heads to the coastal town of Thune where she wants to open a coffee shop. Just a few issues: no one there knows what coffee is, she’s never run a shop before and not everyone wants her to be successful.
I’d heard lots of people say that this was really, really good and it totally lived up to the hype for me. As I said at the top, this is such a comforting read. The cover even says “low stakes” and although there is some peril here, that is pretty much exactly what you get. Viv sets up a coffee shop and creates herself a found family whilst facing down a few challenges. I can be a bit iffy with fantasy, but this is definitely at the end of things that I like – the world made sense, it’s high fantasy but in some ways it reminds me of the sort of fantasy you get from the Discworld, but with less peril and a lot less satire. It’s a proper hug of a book and I do love a found family type story. I bought this a while ago when it was on offer (based off all those recommendations) and had been saving this for a Time of Need, and it did exactly what I needed it to do.
I read Legends and Lattes on Kindle, but it’s also available on Kobo and as an audiobook – read by Travis Baldree himself as is also a prolific audiobook narrator. There’s a prequel called Bookshops and Bonedust which also features Viv which I now need to read, and a third book in the series coming in the autum.
I’m breaking a couple of rules this week because somewhere along the line I had managed to miss that Catriona McPherson had started a new series – and that we were on to the second book in it. But as The Edinburgh Murders came out last week I am at least timely!
It’s 1948 and Helen Crowther is a welfare almoner for the newly formed NHS in Edinburgh. It’s not an easy or a popular job, and her home life isn’t simple either but she keeps on going. While she’s at the bath house with one of her clients, the body of a man is found boiled to death in one of the cubicles. And then another couple of bodies turn up and Helen finds herself investigating because she’s noticed a few things that are worryingly close to home.
This has a great setting and a cleverly put together mystery to solve. I found Helen a really interesting character, and her job gives her an excellent excuse to be sticking her nose into other people’s lives. There aren’t as many historical mystery series set in the immediate post war period as there are set in the 1930s so that make a really nice change as well as the Edinburgh setting. I’m pretty sure this will work best for you if you’ve already read the first book, but I haven’t and I still enjoyed it! Like with McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series, the mystery is darker than you often find in historical mysteries, but it’s not too graphic although there are a couple of gruesome moments its more implied than right there on the page.
My copy came via NetGalley, but it’s out now in the UK on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback. I couldn’t find the first one of these in the shops last week when I was looking, so I don’t know how easy the hardcover version of this is going to be to find though.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 