Category: Series I love

Series I love

Series I Love: Lady Julia Grey

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Deanna Raybourn’s sequel to Killers of a Certain Age came out this week, and when I was planning content for the blog for March I realised that I have never written a proper series post about Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey series. I know. I was as surprised as you are. I’ve written about Veronica Speedwell, and I’ve done a few reviews of books in the series and mentioned them in Recommendsday posts, but never an actual series post. So in honour of the release of Kills Well With Others, this Friday I’m putting that right!

Books from the Lady Julia series

At the start of Silent in the Grave, Sir Edward Grey collapses and dies in front of his wife Julia and a house full of guests. Julia is initially prepared to accept that it’s an accident, but the private inquiry agent her husband had hired to investigate a series of threatening letters is not. And soon Julia too is convinced and the two of them try to work out who was behind the death and sees Julia caught up in a dark

As I’ve mentioned before, Silent in the Grave has a fabulous opening that really sets the tone for the series: “To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband’s dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching on the floor.” I’m struggling to believe while I’m writing this that it came out nearly twenty years ago, and I first read it a decade ago. But I think if you like the tone of Veronica Speedwell, you will also like this. There are a couple of standalone Raybourns that have a slightly different feel, but this has the banter and the mystery and the slow burn romance that she has built on in the (even slower burn in some ways) Speedwell books, but just set in the Victorian rather than the Edwardian era.

And the even better news is that they’re all on some form of offer at the moment on Kindle – you can get Silent in the Grave for 99p as you can with books three and four, with books two and five at £1.99 so basically you can get the whole series for under £7. The picture on Kobo is somewhat similar – although they don’t seem to have book three as far as I can see. Either way, it’s cheaper than trying to buy hard copies because it looks like they’re somewhat out of print. I’m also somewhat annoyed that I could only track down three of the five for the photo because I know I own them all, and it bugs me when I can’t track books down on my shelves when I want to!

Happy Reading!

romance, series, Series I love

Romance series: Lucky Harbor

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Jill Shalvis – 12 books have read them all

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone and how could I do any thing other than a romance series for my post today?

Our setting is a small coastal town in Washington state, and our romances are standalone but interconnected. So you can read them in any order you like, but in some cases you’ll get the best pay off from having read in order (Forever and a Day I’m talking about you). Lots of my reviews for these on good reads use the phrase “fun and flirty” which I think is fair – there are challenges in the lives of lots of the characters, but never in a bleak and hopeless way that takes away their agency in finding a happily ever after. Peril is low, but satisfying resolutions are guaranteed.

On occasion there are issues that could have been solved with a simple conversation – but I forgive them because the accidental pregnancy trip crops up very rarely here, and we all know that’s one of my least favourites!

I thought I had read all of these – but it turns out I may not have. I blame the fact that I read some in omnibus form and that makes it easier to lose track of things. But on the brightside that means I may still have a couple of treats in store when I need them.

These should be pretty easy to get hold of – the three book omnibuses are actually better value on kindle – and if you’re not sure and want to try I find the samples on omnibuses are actually pretty good because they’re often a longer length because there are so many pages the percentage adds up a fair representation

Have a great Valentines everyone whatever you’re doing and a lovely weekend!

Authors I love, Series I love

Belated Happy Birthday Soulless!

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One of the things that happened last month that I missed was the fifteenth birthday of Gail Carriger’s first book, Soulless. I wasn’t quite in on this from the start – I started reading her about five years in, but I have consistently revisited Soulless since – and read all of the connected books at least once. I own many of them in more than one format – Soulless I have in paperback, ebook and audiobook (which I’m actually listening to at the moment) because that is the sort of person I am. Anyway, the point of this is to point you back at my series post for the Parasolverse, although I’ve also got review posts for a bunch of the later books which I read after I started this blog. So if you fancy some vampires, werewolves and more in Steampunk Victorian London this week, these could be just the thing for you!

Series I love

Series I Love: Rivers of London novellas

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You might have noticed on the list last week that that new Rivers of London novella had no sooner arrived that it was read and it’s the final one of the season-themed novellas, which can be read apart from the main series, so that’s what I’m looking at today.

As Ben Aaronovitch says on his website, these are only spuriously linked together – he wanted to write four novellas about side characters in the series, and came up with the seasons theme to make it easier to sell them to his publisher. So you don’t need to read these in order – in fact they don’t even fit into the chronology of the series in the order that they were published. So The October Man features Tobias Winter, who is (roughly) Peter Grant’s German equivalent investigating a murder and filling us in about magic in Germany, which we’ve only ever heard snippets about in the context of World War 2 in the main series. What Abigail Did That Summer fills out Peter’s niece Abigail’s relationship with the foxes of London and has a complicated magical plot, being solved by someone who doesn’t have a lot of magical knowledge. Winter’s Gifts has an X-Files-y feel to it, with FBI Agent Reynolds who has become their magical liaison type person (and who is also referenced in the footnotes in Abigail) sent to snowy Wisconsin after a retired FBI agent called in a weird incident, only to find the town has been flattened by a tornado.

And then finally the new one The Masquerades of Spring which is Nightingale in New York, in the 1920s as seen told by one of Nightingale’s former school mates Augustus Berrycloth-Young. And if you think that sounds like a P G Wodehouse character, you’d be right and it is so very much fun as the Folly’s business explodes into his world and causes untold levels of chaos. I think it’s my favourite of the four, and I don’t think that’s just recency bias – I really like the New York-set Jeeves and Woosters and this really does feel like a cousin of that, plus Nightingale is the character that I consistently want to see more of in the books, so it scratches that itch too.

The Masquerades of Spring came out in hardback and ebook last week, and as you can see I own some of these in hardback because they came out past the point when I was prepared to wait a year for the paperback, but the other three are in paperback now too.

Have a great weekend.

books, Series I love

Series redux: Campion

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BBC Four showed one of the Peter Davidson Campion adaptations the other week, so I thought this Friday was a good time to remind you about Margery Allingham’s Golden Age series. I’ve re listened to a lot of them on audiobook as well as having read all bar one I think of the original nineteen novels featuring her response to Lord Peter Wimsey. They are dated in patches – some novels much more than others – but so are some of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. If you’re interested in the Queens of Crime and you haven’t read any of these, you should. And you can read my much longer thoughts here.

cozy crime, detective, Series I love

Series I Love: Maine Clambake mysteries

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I wrote about this series briefly back in 2022 as a bingeable series, but we’re two years on now and I’ve read eleven of the twelve in the series and I want to upgrade it to a series I love!

Our heroine is Julia Snowden, who grew up in the small Maine town of Busman’s Harbor then moved away for college and to work in finance and then returned at the start of the series to help her family’s struggling business. That’s the clambake of the series title, which is on an island a short boat ride from the town, which her family has owned for several generations. The first mystery is set on the island, but there’s enough building out of the world that there are plenty of options for murder locations (and victims) so that Julia’s business doesn’t start to seem cursed and you wonder how they are staying in business!

One of the things that I particularly like about the series is that it shows the seasonal life of the town – with the frantically busy summer season as the locals try to make the maximum possible from the influx of tourists and then the quieter winter months where many people have to find other sources of income to sustain them until the weather improves again. It also touches on issues like gentrification and modernisation and the impact of the loss of traditional industries on coastal towns like Busman’s Harbor.

Beyond Julia there is a large cast of regulars, including her mother, her sister and her sister’s family, but also others that I don’t want to mention because it’s going to be spoilery. Suffice it to say that Julia builds out a nice life for herself in the town and that Barbara Ross resists the urge to marry her off quickly to an obvious love interest. And we know how much I like that in a cozy series – see also Meg Langslow and Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery and Library Lovers series.

Now eleven of the twelve have recently* dropped into Kindle Unlimited which makes it a great time to have a good old binge on them. The twelfth only came out in April, and there’s no announcement yet for a thirteen so we probably have about nine months at least to wait for another installment.

Have a great weekend everyone

*I mean recently enough that I’ve only just noticed despite having the ones I hadn’t read on more than one of my Amazon wishlists.

mystery, Series I love

Series I Love: The Three Dahlia Mysteries

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The third book in the Three Dahlia mysteries came out this week, and there is a fourth coming in November, so it seems like a good time to talk about Katy Watson’s mystery series.

So as I wrote in my Book of the Week Post about the first book, The Three Dahlias, the Dahlias of the title are three actresses who have all played the same character – Dahlia Lively, the heroine of a series of 1930s murder mysteries. Rosalind was the first to play her in the original movies, Caro played her in a long running TV adaptation and now Posy is taking the lead in a new movie. In the first book the women are all at a convention at the home of the author who wrote the series when a murder happens. In the second book, A Very Lively Murder, the murder happens on the set of the new movie. And now, in the third, Seven Lively Suspects, the trio are at a crime festival where Caro is due to speak about her new book about their first investigation. But before they arrive a podcast team asks them to be part of their new series about a murder five years ago where they are convinced that the wrong man was convicted.

I really like this series. I was sceptical about how Katy Watson was going to find more ways for the Dalhias to get tangled up in murders, but this third instalment is actually pretty ingenious and makes sense without it feeling like they’re bringing murder wherever they go (a la Jessica Fletcher!). We have a fourth coming in November – A Lively Midwinter Wedding – which is teed up at the end of Seven Lively Suspects.

These are hardback first releases – so the first two are in paperback now, and the latest is a hardback. And of course they’re on Kindle and Kobo too. I bought the first two (in hardback!) but I got the latest via NetGalley, which may mean at some point I end up buying the third in hardback as well because I do like a matching set…

Have a great weekend everyone.

Series I love

Series I Love: Lumberjanes

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Happy Friday everyone, the sun is out, we’ve had the longest day and in the US the summer break is underway and children are heading off to Summer Camp, which means that it’s an ideal time to write about the Lumberjanes series.

The Lumberjanes are a group of girls spending their summer at a scout camp, which is presumably somewhere in New England, and though they never really say. The camp looks like any other camp you might have seen in American popular culture, but its environs turn out to be inhabited by various magical and mythical beings and across the course of the twenty volumes they meet them and battle some of them.

I’ve finally finished reading the series – for some reason the final two didn’t turn up at on my order at the comic book store when they first came out and I’d got so distracted that I’d forgotten about it until a month or so back when I looked at the shelf and saw it only went to 18. I can’t quite explain why I love the series so much – except that it mashes up loads of the stuff I loved as a child with great art and some jokes. It’ll make you smile – and if you’re actually the age it’s aimed at, it’ll teach you some valuable life skills for navigating the world. I guess that’s why it won a tonne of awards.

You can get these really easily – any good comic store will have them, as will any bookshop with a graphic novel section. They are in eformats too, but I find graphic novels really hard going on e readers so your mileage may vary on that too.

Have a great weekend!

Series I love

Series I Love: Crown Colony

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The eighth book in the Crown Colony series came out this week, so it’s the perfect time to talk about Ovidia Yu’s historical mystery series set in Singapore.

Our heroine is Su Lin, who in the first book steps in as governess for the acting Governor of Singapore. Su Lin’s family life is complicated – both of her parents are dead and she lives with her grandmother, but because she had polio as a child she’s seen as unlucky. She’s been educated at the mission school and her family are influential in the Chinese community so she has an outsider type perspective on almost everyone in someway but also understands a lot too.

I’ve read six of the eight – and that’s taken me through from the 1930s until the end of World War 2. There are a lot of mystery series set in the 1930s, and a few of them have tackled the war period – but I can’t think of another one that’s set out side of Europe. I loved the Singaporean setting of Ovidia Yu’s Aunty Lee series, and it’s even more fascinating in the past. I’m a history graduate but most of the bits that I’ve really studied have been British or French history – so it’s always really interesting to learn something new as well has having a good mystery.

The six Su Lin Mysteries that I have read have all been in Kindle Unlimited at some point – and I’m hoping that the arrival of number eight means that number seven with become a KU title soon, and as soon as it does, I’ll be all over it.

Have a great weekend everyone.

bingeable series, Series I love

Series I Love: Goldy Schulz

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It’s just over a year since the first book in this series was Book of the Week, and now I’ve read nearly all the books in the series that I can get at a sensible price, so it seemed like a good time to write a series post about them!

At the start of the series, Goldy is a recently divorced single mum running a one woman catering business in a town in Colorado. Her biggest problem is her ex-husband, John Robert Korman aka the Jerk (so named for his initials), gynaecologist and wife beater. In the first book Goldy’s former father in law drops dead at a wake that she is catering and she becomes a suspect. And this is just the first murder Goldy stumbles across in the course of her catering business. They’re not always under suspicion of being poisoned by her food, but in a fair number of cases they could have been – at least initially!

In my BotW post for that first book, Catering to Nobody, I noted my annoyance that the series title gives away a future plot development in the series – aka that Goldy has a different surname and that she gets married again (and to someone you meet in that first book), and I appreciate that I am doing the same here, but that’s how you’re going to find them easiest. And finding these is some of the challenge, because this is a series that started in 1990…

I bought everything I could on Kindle – but as you can see from this picture, of the seventeen books only six of them are on Kindle (in the UK at least) and then the rest I have acquired second hand. And that’s where I have come undone – because some of them are super expensive or impossible to get. I’ve read 13 of the 17, and have one more in the post on the way. But as I’ve read the last book in the series – or at least I assume it’s the last because it came out more than a decade ago – so I’m going for the series post now.

And what I really like about these is the group of regular characters that pop up – as well as Goldy and her son Arch, there is also Tom who she marries, Julian who is almost an adopted son and then Marla, the Jerk’s other ex wife. Between Goldy and the side characters there are plenty of ways to be involved in murders and to get information about them. Also it has recipes. And some of them are recipes that you might want to cook, and actually be able to cook even with the American measurements! I was trying to think of a series to compare them to, but I struggled a little bit – they’re not necessarily funny or witty like some of the other mystery series I like, but they’re not super scary or thriller-y either. I’ll keep thinking!

As I said, these can be a bit of a challenge to get hold of, but here’s the link to the Kindle series list to get you started.

Happy Reading!