Category: Series I love

Christmas books, Series I love

Series I Love: Meg Langslow at Christmas

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Happy Friday everyone, and also happy New Meg Langslow week. Book 38 (!), Five Golden Wings, is out this week and so I’m taking the opportunity to write about why the Meg Christmas books are among my favourite festive themed novels – and in fact are some of the few festive related titles that I actively look forward to.

If you’ve missed my previous appreciations of the series, Meg Langslow is a blacksmith and town organiser in a small town in Virginia called Caerphilly. She has a retired-actor-turned-professor husband and a set of twins and an enormous and eccentric extended family. The series exists in what I call the Floating Now, where time does pass, but not at the same rate as it has passed in real life, but modern developments are incorporated as if there were there all along. See also Charles Paris who has been in his early 50s since the 1970s and is still in them now except that his bedsit is now a studio apartment and he has a smartphone tear her than an answer machine.

Donna Andrews is continuing to write two a year, and after 25 years they’re still great. And don’t get me wrong, I love the non-Christmas ones, but in a world where every year there are more Christmas themed books, be it murder mystery or romance, hers are a cut above. Whether it’s her family descending on her for the season, a storm, or another Caerphilly festive event, Andrews keeps managing to thing of festive scenarios to put the characters in for Meg to stumble across a corpse.

I try my hardest to save them and savour them, but it is hard. The good news is that compared to when I first started to buy them, they’re much easier to get hold of now because they’re on Kindle in the UK, which they weren’t back in 2013 when I first read Murder with Peacocks.

Anyway, my first festive read is still a few weeks away because I do try and get past Halloween before I start on them, but if you’re in the market for some tinsel already, then you could do a lot worse!

Have a great weekend!

romantic comedy, Series I love

Series I Love: Spoiler Alert

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Happy Friday everyone and I have a romance series for you this week, because all three of these are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and so now is an ideal time to read them if you haven’t already.

So Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert series is three connected romances featuring cast members from a TV show that is somewhat Game of Thrones inspired. God of the Gates has been wildly popular but some of the actors (and the fans!) aren’t happy with the turn that the plots have taken. In Spoiler Alert, one of the stars is taking out his frustration with that by anonymously writing fan fiction, which is how he meets April although of course she doesn’t know who he really is. Then – both unknowingly – they meet in real life when Marcus asks April out after one of her fan costumes goes viral because she is plus size. When they start dating, he realises who she is and how is he going to detangle that one. All the Feels was a BotW, so there’s a full review of that already but it sees Alex assigned a minder by the show runners to keep him out of trouble until the final season airs. And Shipwrecked finds two actors who had a one night stand who find themselves co-stars and stuck filming together on a remote island for the duration of the series (because their characters are shipwrecked there) and so really need to not do anything that could end up in them hating each other and still having to work together. But when the series ends, they finally give in – but the trouble is they both have very different plans for the future.

You don’t really need to read these in order – but they do all take place at basically the same time (or at least parts of them take place at the same time) which makes for a really fun experience if you do read them all even if not in the proper order. Olivia Dade writes rom coms – these are funny as well as sexy and I like her characters who aren’t cookie cutter romances heroes and heroines. She was one of the first romance authors who I read who was regularly writing plus sized heroines or slightly older couples, by which at this point I mean in their 30s or up*, and I appreciate that too. I think I’ve re-read the first two twice each now – and probably the only reason I haven’t re-read Shipwrecked is because I own it in paperback so it’s not handy on my Kindle in the same way. They make great sunlounger books, so if you’re planning a late summer trip, these might be a good choice for you.

These are available in paperback as well as on Kindle Unlimited, and surprisingly given they are in KU at the moment, they are still on Kobo, although they are somewhat pricey there and they aren’t linked together as a series, so here is Spoiler Alert, All The Feels and Shipwrecked over there too.

*which given the amount of romances that have early 20s or college age characters at the moment is very welcome to me. New Adult seems to have subsumed the who genre.

detective, series, Series I love

Mystery series: Flaxborough

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Happy Friday everyone, it’s the last working day of August and I’m back with a classic and amusing mystery series.

Flaxborough is a sleepy English market town, in the sort of Lincolnshire-East Anglia part of the world. Our detective is Walter Pirbright, a CID inspector who is polite and decent and solid, if not the cleverest and most exciting detective you will ever read. But his down to earth normalcy means that there can be some quite outlandish happenings that go on around him without it seeming ludicrous. As you go through the series other regulars join him – including Miss Teatime, who arrives as a conwoman but nearly gets herself murders and yet still decides to stay in town. They also do a nice line in split point of view which means that the reader knows more than the police do, which is a lot of fun. Colin Watson apparently took a lot of inspiration from real people who lived in his town and if you’ve ever lived in a small town (or large village) you’ll be familiar with the idea of the local characters complete with their idiosyncrasies- and here they are amped up to eleven!

The first of these was originally published in the 1950s and the last in the 1980s, but I don’t think the same amount of time passes in the books! They were reissued a few years back at which point I read all of them as they came out, mainly from NetGalley but enjoying them so much I bought the ones I was missing, which tells you something about how much I enjoyed these. The twelfth and final one is 99p at the moment, but don’t start the series there – most of the rest are not £2.99 so go have a read of the blurbs and pick one that appeals if you don’t want to read them in order, although the first one is good so you could totally start there.

My favourites included Lonelyheart 4122, where middle aged women start disappearing after signing up to a lonely hearts agency; Charity Ends at Home which is a fun romp through charitable works turned vengeful and murderous; One Man’s Meat where a private investigator finds himself in over his head at a pet food company where the MD’s marriage is falling apart.

These are all available on Kindle and Kobo and I think I saw some in paperback when they first came out. But haven’t recently.

Happy Reading!

historical, series, Series I love

Series Update: Emmy Lake

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Happy Friday everyone! After breaking the rules on Tuesday with my book of the week, I’m back with another later in series book for this Friday’s series post, but I have a reason for this. It’s two years since the previous book in the Emmy Lake series and book four came out last week and I have read it and I wanted to report back.

So the first thing to say is that my prediction that the fourth book would arrive in 2025 was right, and the second thing is that this series is now complete! We rejoin Emmy and the gang in 1944 and by the end of Dear Miss Lake we finally reach the end of the war. In book four, Emmy and the team at Woman’s Friend are trying to find ways to keep morale up on the Home Front as the war drags on, but also starting to think about what might happen afterwards when it’s all over. Emmy’s journalistic career continues to flourish, and her husband Charles* is finally posted back in the UK. But there are still some challenges for the team to face before Victory in Europe finally arrives.

I’ve enjoyed reading this series so much, but every one of them has made me cry at some point – and this one is no exception. And without spoilers, it wasn’t (only) happy tears about the war finally ending for everyone. There is still peril in this one and it’s not insignificant peril. But it’s a book set in wartime, so it wouldn’t feel real if no one in the core group was ever in danger. I’m probably the most avoidant I’ve been of books with potential for deaths of key characters at the moment (murder mysteries don’t count) but I enjoy this series so much that I read it in the run up to release last week (thank you NetGalley for coming through on the copy for me) because I wanted to see how it ended. I’m sad it’s over, but I enjoyed it so much, and I look forward to seeing the characters that A J Pearce creates next.

As I just said, my copy was a preview copy, but it is out now in hardback and on Kindle and Kobo. You really should read the other three books first though to get the most out of it and the good news is that I’ve seen them in in shops on the regular so if you want to read them you shouldn’t have too many issues. Side note: the Audiobook for this series is read by Anna Popplewell, who was Susan in the three Chronicles of Narnia movies that came out about a decade ago.

Have a great weekend everyone!

*yes that’s a spoiler, but it happens in book 2 so what can I do?

Authors I love, Book previews, Series I love

Out Today: New Rivers of London

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Happy New Rivers of London Week! Book 10 in Ben Aaronovitch’s series, Stone and Sky, is out today and I am very, very excited! It’s three years since we last had a full length novel in the series – since Amongst Our Weapons in 2022 we’ve had two novellas, both set in the US but one in the present day with Agent Reynolds, and one in the past with Nightingale in Jazz Age New York. Now they were both great, but I am so excited to see what’s happening to Peter. We’ve had a few hints in the graphic novels because the last three have been beyond the end of Amongst Our Gifts, but it’s not the same as a proper novel. My copy has already arrived – early in fact, except I was staying in London (and it was hot hot hot) and so the only problem is I’m off on a trip for work tomorrow and I don’t dare start it because I’m not sure I’ll get it finished before I have to leave and I don’t want to trek it away with me part finished and when I know I’ll buy books at the airport…

bingeable series, fiction, Series I love

Series Redux: Cazalet Chronicles

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We’ve had events marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day this week, and so I thought I would mention one of my favourite series that’s set at least partially during the Second World War today – and that’s Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet series. I wrote a full post about the books back in 2020 and you can read that here.

The end of the war comes during the third book and as I love the children’s stories (or at least they were children at the start) the third and the fourth books are my favourites of the series in many ways. Here’s a bit from Archie and Clary’s VE Day celebrations

Showers of golden stars from rockets occurred in the crocus-mauve sky and the Palace was floodlit, and round the statue of Queen Victoria an enormous snake of people were dancing the hokey-cokey, singing and stamping their feet, and beyond, near the railings, people were chanting, shouting for the King. There were thousands of them, so many indeed and sometimes so tightly packed that they had held hands all evening in order not to get parted, and sometimes they had to shout to each other to be heard, but sometimes they simply sang whatever everyone else round them was singing: ’Land of Hope and Glory’, ’God Save the King’ and bits of the hokey-cokey.

Confusion by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Anyway, I love them, they’re wonderful and if you haven’t read them, you should. They always seem to be in print and I own them in paperback, ebook and also some on audio. That should give a sense of how dear to me they are. And as they’re not short, if you like them you have about 2,000 pages of them to enjoy.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone.

series, Series I love

Series I Love: Dr Ruth Galloway

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I did have a debate with myself about whether this should be a Series I Love or a mystery series or a bingable series post, but given that I read all fifteen books in the series in less than six weeks and kept going out to get more of them so I could find out what happened next it has to count as a series I loved surely.

Ok so first book in the series, The Crossing Places was a BotW at the end of February, but I’ll recap you the set up any way. Dr Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist who teaches at the (fictional) University of North Norfolk. At the start of the series she is in her late 30s, single and living in a cottage in a pretty bleak area of the Norfolk coast that she fell in love with while working on a dig some years before. She’s fiercely independent and the isolation of her house mirrors the life that she has created for herself. In The Crossing Places she is called by the local police when the bones of a child are found on a beach. This is how she meets Detective Inspector Harry Nelson, originally from Blackpool but who moved to Norfolk to run the Serious Crimes Unit. Ruth becomes the North Norfolk force’s resident forensic archaeologist, which means their paths keep crossing every time historic remains are found and and through the cases Ruth’s life starts to change and expand in all sorts of ways, personal and professional. There are fifteen books in the series, which cover about the same period of time – starting in around 2008 and taking us right through the pandemic – which is quite the experience to revisit in a book!

This has got a lot of things that I love in crime books as well as a good mystery to solve – namely a great cast of supporting characters that form a sort of found family, lots of links and call backs to previous books in the series which reward reading in order and a romantic thread with a strong will-they/won’t-they vibe. Now I know I review a lot of romance books and so some of you reading this are going to be romance readers (as well as crime readers) so please follow this * to the bottom of the post for a spoiler-y point that may be a deal breaker for some of you.

As I’ve said, I binged my way through all of these in about six weeks to the detriment of my other reading plans – and it would have been quicker if I could have got hold of some of the books faster. And yes, it gave me a massive book hangover when they were over because I’d grown so attached to the characters and enjoyed being part of their lives. However, I’m glad that I came to them when the series was already complete because it meant I could just gobble them up and not have to wait a year to find out what happened next – and there are a couple of these that end of cliff hangers which would have driven me mad!

I’d read four of the seven books in Elly Griffiths’s Brighton Mysteries before I came to these – and as I said in the BotW for Crossing Places, I think I had been avoiding these because the covers looked like they would be too dark for me. But they’re no darker than the Brighton ones (which I started because I spotted the first one on NetGalley back in the day) and although they’re darker than most of the American cozy crimes I read, they’re not dark-dark. They’re probably somewhere around the Hawthorne and Horowitz and Thursday Murder Club point in the scale, if such a scale existed.

These are really easy to get hold of – I bought several of these from various Waterstones and Foyles around central London when I finished the one I was reading while I was staying in London. Do read them in order if you can because as I said there are lots of links between them. And of course they’re on Kindle and Kobo too – including omnibus editions of some of them if you want to save some cash on buying them individually.

Have a great weekend!

*As you’ve probably guessed Nelson is the love interest here – but he’s also married and if cheating/infidelity is a deal breaker for you in your reading you will not like this series, do not read, do not pass go, do not collect £200 etc.

books, historical, series, Series I love

Series I Love Redux: Dandy Gilver

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After reading Catriona McPherson’s new book last week, I went back and checked where I was at with the Dandy Gilver series – and lo and behold there was a sixteenth book in the series out in paperback for me to read to complete the set. It’s been three years since I last wrote about Dandy – at which point I was one down on the then fifteen books in the series. We’ve now followed Dandy’s adventures from 1923 all the way through until 1939 and seen her go from a bored wife at home with her boys away at school through to a grandmother worrying about the likelihood of her sons being killed up to fight in another war. And given that there are a bunch of throwbacks her first case in this one, it does feel like this could be the last book in the series, but who knows. I would definitely read about Dandy taking on the Home Front, but I don’t want her boys to be killed – so maybe it’s best to stop? Anyway, you can go back and read my previous posts about the series – consistently darker than you expect them to be, and with far too many different cover designs!

Have a great weekend.

bingeable series, series, Series I love

Mystery series: Fetherings

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The twenty-second book in Simon Brett’s Fetherings series came out this week – and I am nearly up to date with the series at this point, so it seemed like a good point to revisit them.

Our detective duo in this series are Carole and Jude, next door neighbours, very different personalities but unlikely friends. I really love the groups of characters that Brett creates – whether it’s Charles Paris, his bottle of Bells and on off relationship with his wife, or Mrs Pargiter pretending she doesn’t know about her late husband’s criminal activities. In the case of Carole and Jude, it’s the friction between the incredibly uptight Carole – who would secretly love to be less repressed if only she could figure out how – and the much more chilled Jude who has a more open minded attitude towards life but who has people floating in and out of her life but never really staying.

And the small town life of Fetherings means there are plenty of different locations for murders without it seeming repetitive. We’ve had museums, cafes, stables, tennis clubs, boat clubs and when needed nearby towns too. Accoding to the blurb, In Death in the Dressing Room the murder happens on stage during a stage version of a popular sitcom. Given Brett’s knowledge of the workings of TV and Radio I think that this has potential to be a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to reading it when it’s at a sensible price.

If you haven’t read any of these yet, the first six are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment which would give you a good sense of the series – and the next six are all under £3. You can find them on Amazon here.

Have a great weekend

Series I love

Series I Love: Discworld

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My brain can’t quite get it’s head around it, but Wednesday just gone marked ten years since Terry Pratchett died, and I couldn’t let that pass without writing something about the Discworld and my enduring love for it.

— Terry Pratchett & Rob Wilkins (@terryandrob.bsky.social) 2025-03-12T10:15:15.279Z

I’d like to start by pointing you at my Where to Start with Terry Pratchett post for my suggestions about not starting at the beginning of the series unless you’re a frequent fantasy reader, but actually starting with one of the mini-series within the Discworld. It’s six or so years since I wrote that, and since then I think I’ve re-read most of my favourite sub-series, but not the series as a whole. And I think I’ve re-read or re-listen the first two Moist von Lipwig books and The Truth every year – and helped by the fact that there have been fresh audiobooks released I’ve also added in the early watch books, which were a very hard listen on the digital transfer of the original Nigel Planer recordings – or at least they were so hard a listen on Guards! Guards! that I never bought any others and just stuck to the ones that were narrated by Stephen Baxter.

Discworld hardcovers

I love the way that Pratchett skewers the modern world and the things that he picks out to create an alternative version of. I do wish we had got the Moist takes on the Tax system that was hinted at in the final stages of Making Money, but Raising Steam was fun instead. Basically I wish we had more. I wish so the Embuggrance hadn’t happened and we had another ten PTerry books by now rather than only having the old ones to re-read.

I’m also really glad that I went to see him and Rob Wilkins at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 2011 to talk about Snuff. Because I’m an electronic hoarder I went back and checked my emails – and the event was to mark the fact that snuff was his 50th book – but I know that I went because I wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to be able to do events and I wanted to hear him speak. It was four or so years since he’d made the dementia diagnosis public at that point, Rob did the reading from the book and Terry had already stopped signing books – he was stamping instead. My only regret from that night is that I didn’t queue up to get the book stamped and meet him – but it was a work night, it was already after 10pm when it finished and I had come from one 12 hour shift and had another one the next morning. But I went, it was great and I was right – there weren’t many more chances, because I didn’t manage to do another one.

And I really respect the job that Rob and Terry’s daughter Rhianna have done looking after the Pratchett estate – they’ve been really thoughtful and careful about what they do with it and tried to follow his wishes – right down to steamrollering his hard-drives so that nothing else could come out that he hadn’t approved. And judging by Rhianna’s post this week, hopefully we may have a new adaptation of something coming at some point in the relatively near future.

Anyways, I’m off to think about whether I should but some more of the pretty hardbacks, which will lead to me looking at the Discworld Emporium website and then maybe do a Discworld jigsaw under my framed picture of Errol the Dragon. I’ll leave you with the links my original tribute post and my BotW post for Shepherd’s Crown – which I still haven’t been able to re-read.

GNU Sir Terry.