Category: series

books, series

Mystery series: Mitchell and Markby

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So as I discovered earlier this month that there is a new book in the series after a nearly 20 year gap, so this week’s I’ve taken the opportunity to write about Ann Granger’s 1990s cozy detective series.

The Mitchell and Markby of the title are Meredith Mitchell and Alan Markby. She is a civil servant for the Foreign Office who has spent several years working abroad and he is a Detective Chief Inspector. When they meet in the first book, Meredith is visiting Alan’s Cotswold patch to attend a wedding, but they become friends (ahem) and she starts visiting him and eventually she settles in the area as a base from her foreign postings. They’re both slightly older than a lot of cozy crime duos and if I remember correctly quite cautious about the possibility of a romantic relationship. The mysteries are good – police procedurals of the old school sort (ie not thrillers or psychological) and obviously contemporary to the time that they were written.

I read the first 15 books seven years ago, having borrowed the paperbacks from a friend and gave them back to her afterwards – I was delighted to spot a couple of them in Waterstone’s Gower Street this week but it’s the first time I’ve seen any in yonks. But the good news is that they’re all available in nice shiny Kindle editions – some of them at a really reasonable price. The cheapest is the latest one – 99p! – but I really do suggest you start with some of the earlier ones to get the best sense of the series. If you like American cozy series – or like watching TV series like Midsummer Murders, these would be a good options for you. Granger has a couple of other series too – I’ve read about half of her Campbell and Carter series which she wrote after the Mitchell and Markbys, and I’ve read one of her Lizzie Carter series, which are set in the Victorian period. Gower Street actually had quite a good selection the other day – so you never know, I may go back and fill in some gaps!

Happy reading!

books, Forgotten books, series

Mystery Series: Nancy Spain

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I’ve actually named this post for the author of the series because it feels too complicated to do anything else. Today I’m talking about Nancy Spain’s post-WW2 detective (well sort of) novels that feature Natasha DuVivien and Miriam Birdseye – particularly the four that have been republished by Virago in the last couple of years.

Written in the late 1940s and early 1950s the books follow a madcap theatrical duo who stumble across murders in the course of their (more or less) glamorous lives. Miriam is an actress and Natasha is a dancer and as I said in my BotW post about Death Goes on Skis it’s more about the satire and the black humour than it is about solving the actual mysteries. Depending on your reading tastes there’s a lot that she’s satirising here – school stories, mysteries set in theatres, etc. But there’s also a lot of hiding in plain sight queer representation that Nancy Spain snuck in there.

I think they’re going to divide opinion – I enjoyed them, but mum gave up on them I think because they were too much of a mishmash of mystery and also Evelyn Waugh-y satire. And your reaction to that sentence may determine whether these are going to work for you at all!

Virago have done reissues of but there are others in secondhand/collectible only that I haven’t read. You should be able to get hold of the Viragos in bookshops with a reasonable sized fiction section.

Happy Reading!

books, romance, series, Series I love

Series I Love: The Rules of Scoundrels

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And after finally doing that post about some of my favourite Marriage of Convenience romances this week, it’s time to do a series I love that has a marriage of convenience in it’s opening novel!

So the Rules of Scandal series features four aristocrats who have been caught in a scandal and find themselves in the London underworld running a gaming hell. In each book one of them finds love and reclaims their rightful place in society. Or at least the place that they would like to be in anyway! A Rogue by Any Other Name is a marriage of convenience by a hero trying to claim his inheritance, One Good Earl Deserves a Lover has a nearly engaged heroine looking for a taste of the scandalous side of London before she settles down, No Good Duke Goes Unpunished has a hero who is suspected of murdering a woman on the eve of their wedding whose victim reappears alive and Never Judge a Lady by her Cover has a hero who is determined to uncover the secrets at the heart of the gaming hell.

I read these in order as they came out and it has one of the most gasp-worthy reveals at the end of the third book that I have come across in the genre – so surprising that I went back and reread the previous books to check that I hadn’t missed something and that it really was as clever as I thought it was! And I’ve tried not to give too much away in this review – even though if you read the blurb for the last book it gives it away! So don’t do that if you don’t want to be spoiled.

These are fairly old now – but they are available on Kindle, which they weren’t when I first started buying them I don’t think – or at I wouldn’t have started acquiring them in the US mass market format! And yes, it does annoy me that my set doesn’t match. And no I’m not 100 percent sure why because the UK format one isn’t signed so I didn’t get it at one of Sarah’s yea parties – and although the final one is I think it was the first one I ordered from Word. Anyway if you need a good romance series to binge this summer, these would be a good option.

Have a great weekend!

books, romance, series

Romance series: The Fitzhugh trilogy

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The topic of today’s post probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to you if you were paying attention on Monday because I basically read these (slightly out of order) in less than three days!

So this trilogy follows the Fitzhugh siblings – two sisters and their brother as they find their happy endings. Each book centres on one sibling but also has bits of the other siblings’ stories – I read Ravishing the Heiress (book two) first because I got an offer for it and went back for book one straight afterwards because of the split narratives. Book one is Beguiling the Beauty featuring Venetia, who has been widowed twice and hears herself being insulted by the Duke of Lexington and decides to get revenge – and of course falls in love with him in the process. Book two is Ravishing the Heiress – Fitz’s marriage to Millie was arranged – he got her fortune to save his estates and she got to be a countess. EIght years on they’re best platonic best friends but he has no idea that she’s been in love with him all along. Will he realise before it’s too late. And then book three Tempting the Bride is Helena – who has been risking her reputation through the first two books after falling in love with a man who has married someone else. But she ends up engaged to her brother’s best friend who has been tormenting her for years (because he’s secretly in love with her) after a rendezvous goes wrong. And then she loses her memory…

The amnesia plot – and the disguise plot in the first book – are pretty wild but they do work. The third book is actually my least favourite of the three – despite or maybe because of the slow build you’ve seen with Helena and David through the other books. But then I don’t really love amnesia plots usually although as far as they go this isn’t too bad and it does round off the series nicely. My favourite (of course?) is book two because I love a marriage of convenience historical – to the point where I’m sure I must have written a post about my favourites but it seems not. Like their cousin the Fake Relationship contemporary, they are just my absolute catnip and Fitz and Millie are a great couple – friends where one of them hasn’t realised that they’ve fallen in love after all and that the other has been in love with them the whole time.

Anyway, thoroughly recommend. If you’ve read Sherry Thomas‘s Lady Sherlock series I think you’ll recognise the writing style, but these are definitely straight romances rather than the historical mystery with a romantic subplot that she’s doing with Charlotte Holmes. Which reminds me, I’ve got the latest in that series waiting on the shelf. I should really go and read that shouldn’t I…

Have a great weekend everyone.

books, historical, romance, series

Romance series: The Survivors Club

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Mary Balogh has a new book out this week – Remember Me is the second book in her Ravenswood series, so today I’m taking the opportunity to talk about one of her other series – the Survivors Club books.

The six novels and one novella in the series follow six men and one woman who are injured in the Napoleonic Wars and end up convalescing at the same place – the home of the Duke of Stanbrook. In the way of such series, each book follows one of the group as they find love, with glimpses of previous couples as you go through as well and building to the final romance as you get to know the whole group.

I’ve read five of the novels and the novella as well and like reading Mary Balogh when I want something a bit less dramatic than some of the other equivalent historical romances. The heroes and heroines are a little older – old enough to have been soldiers for the men, and som of the women are widows, others have remained unmarried for Reasons. They all have real problems to overcome, but the angst is low and there don’t tend to be many stupid misunderstandings that could be solved with a conversation along the way. Basically you’re getting non-cookie cutter heroes and heroines and characters who grow and fall in love and mature without much melodrama. Although at the end of the series there is a touch of that. But by that point if you’ve read most of the others, then you’ll let it off because you’re getting the romance you’ve been waiting for for a couple of books!

These should be fairly easy to get hold of, I’ve seen all of them in the shops in paperback – although they came out a few years ago (the series was completed in 2016) so it may be slightly trickier now. But they’re also all on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy weekend everyone!

books, historical, mystery, series

Mystery series: Cornish Mysteries

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Happy Friday everyone, I hope you’re all having a good week and have a delightful weekend planned. Allow me to usher you towards it with a post about a 1960s-set cozy crime series!

It’s the 1960s and Eleanor Trewynn is a retired widow who is living over the charity shop she’s running in a Cornish village. Her niece Megan is a police detective who has recently transferred to the local force and now finds herself with a commanding officer who doesn’t really think female officers are a good idea. There’s an artist living next door and a cast of side characters who work in the charity shop. Eleanor and her husband lived all over the world working for a charity and this life experience means that she can handle almost anything and is used to trying to solve problems. And thus you have all the ingredients for a satisfying mystery.

As I’ve mentioned before, I really like Carola Dunn’s other mystery series – the 1920s-set Daisy Dalymple series. I don’t love these quite as much, but they have good puzzles to solve and an interesting premise and it’s nice to read a series set in the 1960s – there are lots of interwar historicals, and some immediately post war and 1950s ones, but not as many sixties ones. Yes Inspector Alleyn gets into the 1960s, but none of them are my favourites, his age is getting a bit fuzzy and Ngaio herself was in her 60s when she was writing them. There are only four of these which is a shame but I’ll take what I can get in these cases.

My copies all came from various bookshops – I read most of them when they first came out a decade ago, but the last one came out a year or two later (as you can tell by the non matching cover…) and I hadn’t seen it in the flesh (or at least I don’t remember seeing it) until I spotted it in Gower Street Waterstones the other week when I was on that little buying spree. What a fortunate circumstance. They’re also on Kindle and Kobo.

historical, series

Series I love: Emmy Lake

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This week’s series post was an easy choice because the third Emmy Lake Book came out in the UK yesterday (it’s not out in the US until August) and I’ve read it and it’s good. It’s also a long time since I’ve written about a historical series that’s *not* a murder mystery one so it’s also a nice dash of variety for you all!

When we meet Emmy Lake at the start of the series, it is 1940 and she is applying for a job at the London Evening Chronicle and dreaming of being a Lady War Reporter. But what she actually gets is a job working for a women’s magazine, as secretary to their Agony Aunt. Mrs Bird doesn’t want any “Unpleasantness” included in the column, But as Emmy reads the letters coming in, she realises that some people need actual help with real problems, and takes matters into her own hands. The sequel, Yours Cheerfully, was a BotW when it came out back in 2021, and now we have a third. I’ve puzzled about how much of the plots of each of the sequels to talk about – because obviously there are spoilers a plenty here. I said you didn’t need to have read Dear Mrs Bird to enjoy Yours Cheerfully, and the same is true of Mrs Porter Calling, but as this is a Series I Love post, I’m encouraging you to read all of them and I don’t want to give too much away.

What I’ve decided that I can say is that the first book shows Emmy finding her feet in the world of magazines, the second shows her getting involved in the war effort, and the third has a threat to the future of the magazine that she loves. And then there is Emmy’s private life, which runs through all three books – her best friend Bunty, some romance, and then obviously living in London during the Second World War. Emmy has a can-do attitude and is very cheerful, which makes her a fun character to follow around – at the start of the series she’s quite sheltered – or at least not very worldly, but obviously that’s evolved as she’s seen more of life. As you know, I’m a Girl’s Own reader – and I’d say she’s a bit like one of the school girls from those series grown up and let lose on the world. It is a book set in the war, so it is inevitable that sad and bad things happen in this – but if you’ve read a few books set in London in the Second World War you can see what’s going to happen in the first book coming* so you’re slightly forewarned.

By the end of the new book, we’ve reached the start of 1944 so I’m hoping that means we have another book to come, because there are still some questions unanswered, but as it’s taken at least two years between books so far, I’m resigning myself to not getting any answers until 2025 at the earliest! My copy of Mrs Porter Calling came from NetGalley, but I think you should be able to find it fairly easily in the bookstores – I’ve seen Yours Cheerfully on the shelves in the last few weeks ahead of this one coming out too – and of course they’re all also in Kindle and Kobo. And if you’re a Kindle Unlimited member, the first book is in KU at the moment as well.

Have a great weekend everyone!

*Slight spoilers: This book may have been the origin of my unofficial Cafe de Paris rule. If you know, you know. I’ve tried to write a post about it the idea, but it would be full of spoilers. So full of spoilers…

series

Bingeable series: Fixer-Upper Mysteries

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This Friday I’m talking about a distinctly bingeable series, which has a new instalment out this week – even if my preorder hasn’t arrived yet – it’s Kate Carlisle’s Fixer-Upper mysteries.

The set up for these is a good one: Shannon Hammer is a building contractor in coastal California, having taken over her father’s business when he retired for health reasons. She’s lived in Lighthouse Cove all her life and has a group of close friends as well as family living there. There’s an old classmate from high school who is always out to make trouble for her and divide in town between the people who live there year round and the seasonal folks which adds a bit of friction on top of the regular appearance of bodies. In the first book in the series the town’s police chief is a new arrival and there’s also a crime writer who has just moved to the area as well. So there are plenty of regular characters and lots of options for the mystery plots.

I recommended the first in the series, A High End Finish, when I read it back in January, and since then I’ve read the other eight that were already published – which is the very definition of a binge! Without giving too much away, the romantic subplot in this doesn’t go the way that I was expecting/fearing from the first book, and in the later books some of the issues I had with the resolution of the first one are ironed out. Lighthouse Cove keeps developing new historic buildings or sites to facilitate plots, which is amusing but also keeps the series from feeling repetitive if you’re reading them one after another. Basically they’re fun, solidly plotted cozy crimes with a good heroine – and that’s actually harder to find that you’d think at the moment!

I think you’re going to have to order these in from the book giant – I picked up the first nine secondhand from a book group I’m in on Facebook and I preordered the latest from Amazon to complete the set.

Happy Reading!

books, romance, series

Romance series: Cowboys of California

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Given my focus on Rich People Problems this week, I thought I’d do a rich people romance series this week, just because I could. It just felt like a nice piece of synergy – although it’s a shorter than usual post because I’ve already written about two of the three of the series at length!

So the three books in Rebekah Weatherspoon’s Cowboys of California series feature three brothers whose family own a luxury dude ranch in California. They’re also fairytale re-tellings: A Cowboy to Remember is Sleeping Beauty, If the Boot Fits is Cinderella and A Thorn in the Saddle is Beauty and the Beast. As I said at the top I’ve written a bit about all of these before – the first and the last were BotWs when they came out, and the middle book was in a Romance on Ranches post, so there’s more detail on all the plots here, but basically these are smart and fun – and so smart about the fairy tale retelling angle that I sort of didn’t realise they were doing it until I read the blurbs.

The reason I wanted to feature them today is because of those paralels with the rich people problems books – because they’re about people falling in love in a low-key, money is no object, no-one’s future is in peril sort of way. There is a little bit of suspense-y peril in the final book, but nowhere near the peril in Weatherspoon’s romantic suspense series.

If you’re in the UK, the easiest way of getting hold of these is going to be on ebook – this is the link to the Kindle series page, here is the Kobo equivalent. The ebook prices do go up and down – I read two from the library but bought the other on kindle for under £1, so if you’re in the market for them and not in a rush, add them to however you run your watch list for book prices. If you’re in the US, they were definitely in paperback there, but I don’t know what the situation is in terms of getting hold of them at the moment as they came out during the pandemic and I don’t know how long physical books are staying in print in the bookstores these days.

Have a great weekend everyone.

books, mystery, series, Thriller

Mystery Series: Charlotte Holmes

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This isn’t the first time I’ve written a series post about a Sherlock Holmes related series – I think this is the third now, and that’s only the tip of the Sherlockian universe. But this time it’s a young adult series set in a New England boarding school so you can see that this might have appealed to me!

Yes I only have three of the four books!

So in the first in the series, A Study in Charlotte, we mean Jamie Watson who has just got a rugby scholarship to a Connecticut prep school. He’s not massively keen on the idea – it’s too close to his estranged father but it’s also where Charlotte Holmes goes to school. She’s a descendent of Sherlock and Jamie would has spent his whole life trying to play down (or ignore) his connection to the the famous detective’s chronicler so the last thing he needs is for the two of them to be in the same place. But after a student dies at the school, the two of them are being set up to take the fall so they start working together to find the real culprit.

There are four books in the series and the first book is the most standalone of all of them – and when I first read it I was expecting any sequels to be self contained mysteries but the other three are very much interconnected. Charlotte Holmes is a Holmes reimagined, Mary Russell is a Holmes continuation and Brittany Cavallaro is doing Holmes the new generation – in a world where Sherlock’s adventures with Watson are famous and have left a legacy (and a fortune) for his descendants.

The pace of each novel tends to start of slowly and then pick up pace as the mysteries start to hurtle towards their conclusions. The final book is a little different because it’s less thriller, more mystery but it is a satisfying end to the series. I read the first in the series when I was in the US when the first one was the only one available and read the series across a period of years as they became available which was actually slightly complicated in the UK as they didn’t become available in paperback straightaway and they are not on in Kindle in the UK. They’re still a little tricky to get hold of if you’re here but hopefully not entirely impossible.

Have a great weekend everyone.