Category: Book of the Week

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, books, crime, detective, fiction, reviews, Thriller

Book of the Week: The Murder Quadrille

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This week’s BotW is Fidelis Morgan’s The Murder Quadrille – which is another Fahrenheit Press crime novel (that subscription I purchased is turning out to be a good move so far).  Honorable mention goes to The Little Shop of Happily Ever After by Jenny Colgan – but that got a mini-review in my Half Term Reads post, so it’s not entirely left out!

This is really hard to summarise without giving the plot away, but I’m going to try.  The Murder Quadrille opens at a dinner party being given by a businessman to impress his bank manager.  His (really quite annoyed) wife is doing the food.  Also invited is their lawyer and his trophy girlfriend and an American crime writer.  Talk around the table turns to the dead body that’s turned up on the Common, but is that a good idea?

I liked this so much.  It’s dark and funny and clever and you never quite know what’s happening.  The narrative moves around from dinner guest to dinner guest – often jumping at just the point when you think you’ve worked out what’s happened, only to reveal another twist that you didn’t see coming.  Brilliant.

This is so difficult to categorise – it’s not a detective story, but if you like cozy crime it’s not really very bloody or graphic – although it is blooming creepy – and really quite thrilling.  I can’t really think of anything that’s really similar, although in the initial stages Suzette A Hill’s Francis Oughterard series came to mind – but it got much more complicated than that very quickly!

Get your copy of The Murder Quadrille from Amazon Kindle or investigate the possibility of a Fahrenheit Books Subscription here.  I’ve had three books through the subscription (which I bought for myself, on the recommendation of a friend) and read two of them so far and really enjoyed both.  The price has gone up since I purchased – but so has the number of books they’re publishing this year, so it’s still a saving.

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.

Book of the Week, Fantasy, graphic novels, Thriller

Book of the Week: Body Work 1

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Tricky choice this week.  I read Eloisa James’ My American Duchess and I have things to say about it – but I read it for Novelicious, so you’ll have to wait!  I also read the second Sam Jones book and that was, if anything, even more fun than the first (Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane references!) but it’s only been two weeks since I made The Black Rubber Dress BotW and I don’t like to repeat myself too often*.  So I’m going left field and picking a comic – Part 1 of Body Work, the Rivers of London graphic Novel.

I’ve mentioned Ben Aaronvitch here before (Rivers of London was a BotW and a Christmas Pick for Him) and i actually broke one of my rules reading this – this is actually set between book 4 and book 5 in the series and I was only reading book 3 when I read this (although book 4 may be following shortly).  But having missed out on a physical copy of this in its first printing back earlier this year, I treated myself to this at the weekend to see what I thought of it ahead of the release of the trade in April.

I’m not a big reader of graphic novels, so something based on a familiar set of characters is attractive to me.  Of course in these cases there’s always the risk that the illustrations won’t match the pictures that you have in your head of the characters.  But in this case, that wasn’t a problem for me.  This isn’t very long, but all the characters that I encountered in this were near enough to how I imagined them.  It’s pretty much all set up for what is going to come next, but it’s fun, witty and feels like it fits with the novel.

It left me wanting to know what happens next, but I need to read book four first so that I don’t ruin anything when I read the next part of this.  If you want to try a graphic novel, the Kindle version (read on a tablet) is under £2 at time of writing, or if you trust me you can get your preorder in for the Trade version in Paperback or Kindle.  But as it’s so far ahead until it comes out, please do consider buying it from your local comic book store and supporting an indy.  If you don’t know where that is, here’s a handy resource to help you.  My local shop is friendly and helpful – and will get copies of stuff in for me *justlikethat* without deposit or anything.  If you want more recommendations they’ll be able to help too.

* Although do read Sam Jones.  It’s so worth it.

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Queen Lucia

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This week’s BotW is the first in the Mapp and Lucia series by E F Benson – which doesn’t actually feature Miss Mapp – just Lucia!  I’ve read Mapp and Lucia – which is the the fourth boo in the series and have come back to the start.  I have Miss Mapp waiting on the Kindle in the interests of fairness!

 

 In Queen Lucia, we meet the residents of Riseholme and their snobbish leader.  Emmeline Lucas – Lucia – always wants to have the upper hand, and employs all sorts of underhand methods to dominate the neighbourhood.  She and her husband drop snippets of Italian into conversation to make people think they’re fluent (they’re not), and she practices her piano duets in secret so she can “sight-read” them when Georgie comes over.  Georgie is her best friend (if she can be said to have one when life is a constant competition for superiority), balding and greying and desperate to hide it, he has his faults, but in this book at least is a slightly more sympathetic character than Lucia.

But for all that Lucia is awful, this is such a fun book.  The townspeople’s snobbery leads them into trouble at every turn.  If you watched the 2014 TV adaptation you’ll recognise some of the plots here.  Snigger as the Riseholmians embrace yoga. Chuckle as they compete to be best friends with the visiting opera singer. Cringe as Lucia’s (lack of) proficiency in Italian comes under scrutiny.  And then thank goodness that your group of friends are nothing like this.  And if your group of friends are like this, then maybe consider finding some new ones – constantly trying to one-up everyone else must be exhausting!

Queen Lucia is available for free on Kindle and although it’s not free on Kobo it is available in a variety of file formats for free from Project Gutenberg.  There’s also a variety of omnibuses (omnibii?) at differing price points (depending on if you want the cover that ties in with the TV series) and DVD releases of both the most recent and the 1980s TV series.  Enjoy!

Book of the Week, books, detective, reviews

Book of the Week: Black Rubber Dress

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This week’s BotW is Black Rubber Dress by Lauren Henderson.  These days she’s better known as Rebecca Chance, best-selling author of glamourous, sexy thrillers, but back in the 90s she wrote the Sam Jones series of mysteries about a sculptor in Camden.  They’re currently being republished by Fahrenheit Press (more on that later) and have come into my orbit.  Black Rubber Dress is the first of them to reappear.

Sam’s just made a big piece for a London bank.  But soon after the unveiling a body is found underneath it.  Determined to prove that it wasn’t her fault, she gets caught up in a web of intrigue, blackmail and Banking.  There’s stockbrokers, anorexic rich girls, trust funds, fraud and much, much more. Sam is smart, wise-cracking and no holds barred.  She knows what she wants, and she’s going to get it.  Her life is nothing like mine and if put in some of the situations she’s in I would curl up and cry, but reading the book I really wanted to be her.  I already have the second book underway.

It’s also quite fun to read and realise that a book written and set in the 90s is now a period piece – Sam has an answering machine not a mobile, there’s no talk of the internet and Camden is much seedier than than it is now.  It’s also a little traumatic – because I can remember life being like that too!

Start your Sam Jones obsession with Black Rubber Dress – it’s currently yoyoing between 99p and £1.99 on Kindle.  And when you get hooked, you might want to consider Fahrenheit Press’s Book Club – until the end of January for £36/$60/€50 you can get every book they publish this year.  I treated myself as a birthday present to myself (yes, another one) and the first to pop into my inbox was Freeze My Margarita – the next Sam Jones book…

Book of the Week, books, historical, Thriller

Book of the Week: The Hourglass Factory

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So, a difficult choice for BotW this week – I finished the latest Laurie Graham last week and really enjoyed it – but I also read Lucy Ribchester’s Hourglass Factory and enjoyed that too.  So in the end, I’ve picked The Hourglass Factory for BotW and decided to do an Authors I Love post on Laurie G instead, which’ll be coming up in a few weeks. So more for you to read. Bonus.

The Hourglass Factory
Some of my best photos are taken on the train. No idea why.

In The Hourglass Factory, tom-boy reporter Frankie George is trying to make waves in Fleet Street, but all she’s getting are the women’s interest stories an the gossip columns.  When she gets assigned to write a profile of trapeze-artist-turned-suffragette Ebony Diamond she gets short shrift.  But then Ebony disappears and Frankie finds herself drawn into a world of corsets, circuses, tricks and suffragettes.  Where has Ebony gone?  What is going on with the suffragettes? And will anyone listen to Frankie if she finds out?

This has been sitting on my shelf for aaaaaages (what’s new) and I kept meaning to read it.  Then I saw it recommended by another blogger (Agi’s onmybookshelf) as one of her books of the year of 2015 – alongside several other books that I had read and liked and it gave me the push that I needed.

I really enjoyed this.  I haven’t studied the women’s suffrage movement in Britain in much depth – apart from as part of my history GCSE – so I knew the basics, but I don’t think you’d have too much trouble if you knew even less.  Lucy Ribchester paints a vivid picture of 1912.  Post-Edwardian London springs to life – all dark corners, imminent peril, seedy clubs, variety acts, cuthroats, suffragettes and jails.  Some passages were tough going – early 20th century jails were not nice places to get stuck in – but it was totally worth it.  This is quite a long read (500 pages) but it is pacy, exciting and thrilling – you don’t notice the pages going by.  So good.  And another cautionary tale about letting books sit on the shelf.

Get your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Foyles, from Audible, or on Kindle, ebook or Kobo.  You’re welcome.  And thank you Agi for giving me the kick to read it.

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Bleakly Hall

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Welcome to the first Book of the Week post of 2016!  I really enjoyed writing these last year – and find that having to pick a favourite book each week really helps to focus the mind – not just about what I like and don’t like about books, but also about what I chose to read from the pile.  It doesn’t stop the bingeing on one author, but it does mean I try to add some variety in – after all a BotW from the same author each week would get very dull very quickly.  And speaking of binge-reading, there’ll be a post coming up at the weekend about the Pink Carnation series – which is one of the reasons why one of the three Lauren Willigs I read last week isn’t occupying this spot now!

So, Bleakly Hall.  This has been on the pile for over 2 years (!) – and had been on my radar for some time before that.  I think it’s another that was mentioned in the Emerald Street book section (where I’ve found several really interesting books) which I then added to my Amazon pile to wait for the price to come down (although in the end it came from Waterstones who must’ve been doing a deal judging by the prices) which is what happens to a lot of books.  Anyway, you all know about the state of my to-read pile and the less said about it the better.

Bleakly Hall
This is my best attempt at artistic. I polished the wood specially.

Bleakly Hall is a hydroprathic spa, populated by a cast of misfits and damaged people after the Great War.  New nurse Monty has taken a job there because she has a score to settle with Captain Foxley.  The Captain is there because he served with one of the two brothers who own it.  The other brother came back from the war minus his legs and now has a matrimonial problem on his hands.  Ada worked with Monty during the war – and misses the purpose and status it gave her. The residents are elderly, thin on the ground and not conducive to a health bank balance for the owners.  And then there’s the ominous noises from the pipes…

I read a lot of books set in and around the First World War as part of my A-Level English literature and the period has continued to fascinate me in the intervening years (no, I’m not telling you how many years) and so this book was right up my street.  I’m particularly fascinated with the aftermath of the war* and how it affected people so I found the characters in this fascinating.  And they are a bit of a microcosm of post-war society – people want nothing to have changed, people for whom everything has changed, others for whom everything has changed, but in a different way and then those who would quite like the war back in some ways.

This is quite black in places – there are moments that will make you laugh and then there are moments of horror.  The spa is damp and run down and there’s comedy in the treatments and quackery provided and then there are the flashbacks to Belgium and the carnage of the trenches.  The two are nicely balanced – and sometimes you realise you are still chuckling over the latest antics at the spa but you’re in the trenches and really shouldn’t be laughing.

I enjoyed (if you can call it that) Bleakly Hall – and got a lot out of it.  If you’ve read the usual Great War suspects – like Goodbye to All that, Regeneration, Testament of Youth etc – then this might be a good place to go next.  It’s available on Kindle, at Amazon (where there are some good second-hand prices), Waterstones and Foyles.

* It’s one of the aspects of Lord Peter Wimsey‘s character that I find really interesting, as is Daisy’s search for a career and a new future after the war and the changes it brought in Carola Dunn’s early Daisy Dalrymple books.

American imports, Book of the Week, new releases, reviews, romance

Book of the Week: Anything For You

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This week’s BotW is Kristan Higgins’ latest romance Anything For You – which in a stroke of serendipity is out today!  For those of you who are all Christmas’d out, this would make a great break from the festivities.  It has a winery, some star-crossed lovers and a whole lot of fun.

Anything For You tells the story of Connor and Jessica.  They’ve been hooking up in secret for years and now Connor wants to take it public – and make it official.  But Jessica thinks things are fine as they are – and she has her brother to look after, her brother who really doesn’t like Connor.  So with Connor down on one knee and telling her it’s all or nothing, how sure is Jessica that marriage isn’t for her?

This is such a good read.  Jessica and Connor have such a tangled backstory – which is explained really well in a series of flashback-type sequences in the aftermath of the proposal.  They are both really complicated, well thought out characters.  Connor has quite a privileged background (I mean he’s not a billionaire or a billionaire’s son, but there’s some money there) but a difficult relationship with his parents.  Jessica has dragged herself up from a trailerpark whilst bringing up her little brother in the process – she’s got trust issues, abandonment issues and a bit of an inferiority complex.  Watching them work out their problems is a really engrossing read.

And they are proper problems that need a proper resolution.  I’ve read a lot of romances where the obstacles keeping the hero and heroine apart aren’t really obstacles – or are easily resolved.  But these two have something real and tangible to work out.  And the resolution is really well worked out – it doesn’t involve one of them suddenly doing an abrupt character change or an about face.  They work out their problems and grow and mature to a solution.

And if that sounds too serious – don’t worry!  There’s plenty of humour here too – Connor has a fabulously funny relationship with his twin sister Colleen (aka Dog Face) and the two of them have some great sparky exchanges.  And Con and Jess have their moments too.  Add to that a very stabbable events planner and some meddling friends and the angsty bits are well balanced out.

This was my first Kristan Higgins – but I’ve already found another one in the Kindle backlog pile so that may well have jumped its way closer to the top.  My copy came via NetGalley, but you can get yourself a copy from Amazon or Amazon.com – although it doesn’t seem to be available on Kindle in the UK or the US at the moment.

Book of the Week, books, new releases

Book of the Week: Bricking It

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This week’s BotW is Bricking It by Nick Spalding. I read a lot of books last week, many of them good but Christmas-themed – and of them more in the next few days. But Bricking It made me laugh despite the tonsillitis so it was an obvious choice for my non-festive Book of the Week!

Bricking It tells the story of Dan and Haley Daley, who have inherited a run-down farmhouse from their grandmother and decide to do it up to make some extra money. And of course the road to profit does not run smoothly.  There’s an eccentric architect, a gang of builders, a TV crew and a few skeletons in the cupboard.  Oh, and a bit of sibling rivalry too!

I thought Bricking It was a bit different from the usual run of house renovation stories. Haley and Dan both have their issues to deal with and that gives the book a great heart as well as a lot of jokes. If you’re off work for Christmas but not feeling in the mood for a Christmas-set book, this may well be the perfect solution to read curled up in front of the Christmas tree after you’ve finished wrapped (or unwrapping) your presents!

Get your copy from Amazon or on Kindle.