Category: week in books

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week In Books: March 7 – March 13

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Hmmmm.  What to say about this week’s reading – distinctly children’s book heavy?  I had a spree with a dealer a few weeks back and they were just what I needed for my post-nightshift recovery.  And I finally finished The Shadow Hour at the weekend – once my brain had got back in gear!

Read:

Heartsong Cottage by Emily March

The Bronte Plot by Katherine Reay

Chiltern School by Mabel Esther Allen

The Ballet Family by Mabel Esther Allen (Jean Estoril)

The Ballet Family Again by Mabel Esther Allen (Jean Estoril)

The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan

Started:

It Happened One Season by Stephanie Laurens, Mary Balogh, Jacquie D’Alessandro and Candice Hern

Still reading:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Freya by Anthony Quinn

Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford

Oh dear.  I had a bit of a mega spending spree over the weekend.  I paid for it (mostly) with vouchers, but still added a lot more to the to-read pile than I’ve taken off it.  Whoops.

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week In Books: February 29 – March 6

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A relatively slow reading week.  My second run of nights happened over the weekend and I’m tired and cranky and can’t concentrate on complicated books – my aim for the coming week is to finish The Night Circus and The Shadow Hour – both of which I started and was enjoying before the nights but don’t have the brain power to concentrate on at the moment

Read:

The Record Set Right by Lauren Willig

The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson

Snowflakes on Silver Cove by Holly Martin

The Jade Lioness by Christina Courtney

Death of a Cozy Writer by G M Malliet

A Death at the University by Richard King

Started:

Freya by Anthony Quinn

Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford

Still reading:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan

I was so good and well behaved on the nights – no books bought and not much else either!  I did nearly buy a new Kindle (I want a Paperwhite so I can read in bed when I can’t sleep) but I couldn’t quite justify it.

 

Book of the Week, Children's books, detective, new releases

Book of the Week: Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection

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Oh I do love a good children’s detective yarn – and I had two to pick from when I was selecting my BotW this week.  I went with Julia Lee’s latest – because it’s out on Thursday and doesn’t feature any murder – so I think I can give it to my 7-year-old niece who has the right reading age, but who can’t cope with too much peril!

Nancy Parker's Diary of Detection
Perfect reading for the train to work ahead of a nightshift!

Nancy Parker is 14 and has just left school.  She gets her first job – as a housemaid to the  rather glamorous Mrs Bryce. It’s not her dream job (who dreams of cleaning at 14!), but its more exciting than she expects as soon the whole household is living in a rented house at the seaside.  There are parties, talk of movie-making, a reputed air-ace but also a cook who seems to be hiding a secret, a string of burglaries and chores – lots of chores.  Nancy teams up with two other children from the neighbourhood to try and work out what is going on.

The book made up of a combination of extracts from Nancy’s journal (given to her as a leaving gift by her school teacher) and a third person narrative – which covers what the other children are up to.  It’s fun, engaging and fast-paced.  As someone who loved all of Enid Blyton’s mystery series (but particularly the Five Findouters) this really worked for me and filled that gap.  And unlike those Blyton stories, this books shows the range of experiences in the 1920s – Nancy would only have appeared in one of those as the maid providing the picnics for the other children.  And there’s also nice nods to the other realities of the 1920s like shortages of men for women to marry and women having to give up their jobs to returning soldiers.

As an adult, I figured out what Mrs Bryce was up to quite early on – but that’s because I’ve read a lot of the grown-up versions of this sort of story, but I think for a young reader it would be a fun, thrilling and non-threatening mystery.  I love Robin Steven’s Wells and Wong series and also enjoyed the second book in Katherine Woodfine’s Clockwork Sparrowbook last week (the other BotW contender) but they are definitely a level up from this in the scares and peril – which isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean that you need to be  bit more mature to be able to cope with them.  I’m desperate to give my niece Murder Most Unladylike – but murder is quite a big deal for a 7-year old – at 10 I was terrified by some of the Miss Marples*.   But Nancy Parker’s adventure feels like a new equivalent of a Secret Seven or a Famous Five – which is A Very Good Thing.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance proof – but you can get your copy from Amazon, Kindle, Waterstones or Foyles.  I don’t know if it’ll be in the supermarkets – but it feels like it might as the Katherine Woodfine was.  Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week In Books: February 22 – February 28

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Now that is what four nightshifts can do for the to-read pile – I actually finished my 7th book of the week on the way home from the last night shift on Friday morning.  You’ll notice that the two books that are still on the go are ones where I need to use my brain a bit – and my brain is frazzled so it was light reading only!  But I did finish all my February new releases from NetGalley before the end of the month (with 3 days to spare!) – which is unusual for me.  Now I just need to work on the slight backlog from the autumn when everything got a way from me a bit…

Read:

Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes

Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection by Julia Lee

The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth by Katherine Woodfine

Murder on a Silver Platter by Shawn Reilly Simmons

A Summer at Sea by Katie Fforde

The Duke’s Accidental Wife by Erica Ridley

The Stylist by Rosie Nixon

Ghostwriters Anonymous by Doreen Wald

The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone

Started:

The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson

Still reading:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan

I was very, very virtuous and only impulse bought non books on the nightshift.  The pile is still massive though!

 

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!

 

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week In Books: February 15 – February 21

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Two longstanding books finished this week (with most of the reading of them done this week) and a few nights away from home and a bit of a social life means not as much read as I was hoping at the start of the week.  I also had a lot of stuff on the go and tried to prioritise getting some of them finished over starting new stuff that I could have read quicker.

Read:

Murder on the Half Shell by Shawn Reilly Simmonds

The Prince’s Boy by Paul Bailey

The Edge of the Fall by Kate Williams

The Feud in the Fifth Remove by Elinor M Brent Dyer

Villa America by Liza Klaussman

Started:

The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan

The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone

Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection by Julia Lee

Still reading:

Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Stylist by Rosie Nixon

A big old order of republished classic school stories arrived this week (hence the Feud in the Fifth Remove on the read list) and a couple of kindle books which were on a deal and recommended by the Smart Bitches crew.

 

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.

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week In Books: February 8 – February 14

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Late night train journies really help with the book reading, but I need to sort out this habit of mine of starting big thick books that are too chunky to take in my handbag to work!  I also read a couple of single issue comics, but they don’t have Goodreads entries, which I guess means I can’t count them!

Read:

Sisters on Bread Street by Frances Brody

The Little Shop of Happily Ever After by Jenny Colgan

The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl by Melissa Keil

The Murder Quadrille by Fidelis Morgan

Lumberjanes Vol. 2: Friendship to the Max by Noelle Stevenson

The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow by Katherine Woodfine

Started:

The Stylist by Rosie Nixon

The Prince’s Boy by Paul Bailey

Still reading:

The Edge of the Fall by Kate Williams

Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Villa America by Liza Klaussman

My headphones broke midweek and in ordering new ones, I may have bought 5 second hand books to get me free delivery on them.  I would have been buying then at some point anyway…

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.

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week In Books: February 1 – February 7

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A much more “normal” (for me) week.  Lots of good stuff here – new stuff from authors I like, a new author or two and a wide range of stuff – historical fiction, contemporary women’s, detective, childrens, started some fantasy etc.

Read:

Whispers Underground by Ben Aaranovich

The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin

All Aboard (Canal Boat Cafe Part 1) by Cressida McLaughlin

The Glittering Art of Falling Apart by Ilana Fox

The Case of the Blue Violet (A Wells and Wong short) by Robin Stevens

Secrets of a Lady by Tracy Grant

Dangerous to Know by Tasha Alexander

Started:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Villa America by Liza Klaussman

Still reading:

The Edge of the Fall by Kate Williams

Sisters on Bread Street by Frances Brody

Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes

I don’t think I ought to talk about the acquisitions this week – a couple of orders with book dealers have come through and I got more than I was hoping for/expecting.  Mostly children’s books, and some are books I read as a child and wanted a copy of, so they kind of don’t count, right?  It did make me restrain myself from a few other purchases though.  Long may the will power continue.  Not that this week is a demonstration of will power at all really!