Category: week in books

Book of the Week, detective, mystery, new releases

Book of the Week: The Thursday Murder Club

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Well, well, well. As you might have noticed I managed to bring the ongoing list down a bit last week. I’m quite pleased with myself, but my book of the week is one of the many that came out last Thursday. I wasn’t intending on this being the featured review this week – it’s not exactly low profile, but it was the book that I liked the most last week and thought that I would have the most to say about. Also I had a very wafty weekend and spent more time watching Formula One and Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader: Making the Team than I did reading, so some of the other stuff I had planned for the week didn’t get read…

Cover of The Thursday Murder Club

First, before I get to the plot, I have been excited about this book since it was announced more than a year ago. If you’re in the UK, you’ll know Richard Osman as the one with all the answers on Pointless or the host of House of Games. He’s got a lovely way about him on Twitter, he always comes across very well any time you hear him talking and the plot synopsis sounded great. In fact it all sounded so good that I was worried it couldn’t live up to my expectations – especially as a debut novel. I mean murder mysteries aren’t exactly easy to pull off.  The fact that I’m writing about this here, indicates that I have good news for you! Anyway, to the plot.

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron all live at frankly rather nice sounding retirement village in Kent. Every Thursday they take over the Jigsaw room meet up to discuss unsolved murders (under the guise of a society for fans of Japanese opera to keep away the nosy). Then the owner of the retirement village is found dead, just after a consultation meeting about an expansion. Now they have a live case to solve – they’ve got the skills to do it, but will they manage it before it’s too late?

Now reading that plot synposis you’ll think that you’ve read stories like this before. And yes this does have some similarities with cozy crime series featuring an older protagonist. But it’s not really a cozy crime. The mystery is twistier and more complicated. I can’t say much about the solution, because that would be spoiling things and you know that I don’t do that, but it doesn’t quite fit the cozy format. And as well as the mystery, there are proper side plots. It’s all told as a mix of narrative and Joyce’s diary – which really works as she is the newest member of the club and gets to do a lot of the exposition – but all four members of the Club are properly realised characters with backstories that you hear about, hopes, worries and fears. And the two police officers are great too. It’s also got a strain of melancholy to it – they are old people and they’re not done with life, but they do worry that this might be the “last time” that they do something and worry about the things they have lost (and in some cases develop strategies to try and combat this). Oh and it’s funny. Dryly funny and witty not pratfalls and stupidity funny. Wry observances and witty asides type funny. It’s great. I would happily have spend another 100 pages with the gang.  If there’s another one, you can sign me up to read it now.

My copy of The Thursday Murder Club came from NetGalley, but you should be able to get this everywhere. I’ve been out to London today and walked up Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road and could see it in the front section in the Big Foyles and it was in the Window at the Waterstones. It’s that sort of release – probably in the supermarkets too, and definitely in the airport bookshops, if you’re lucky enough to be going somewhere. When I went looking for links, Amazon was out of stock of actual copies – which means it’s an even smarter choice to order if from your local indie. And of course it’s out in Kindle, Kobo and Ebook.

Happy Reading!

 

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 31 – September 6

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The schools are going back and the holidays are over. Normal life is resuming. Or is it? Can it ever? Well who knows, but these are still quite strange times. However, I’ve used whatever back to school energy I could summon to reduce the number of books on the Still Reading List a bit. I’m quite pleased with me. In relative terms anyway.

Read:

Real Men Knit by Kwana Johnson

She Represents by Caitlin Donohue*

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman*

The Last Boyfriend by Nora Roberts

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

Uneasy Lies the Crown by Tasha Alexander

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Started:

Hoax by Brian Stelter

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

Tweet Cute by Emma Lord

Murder on a Girls’ Night Out by Anne George

Still reading:

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi*

Still not counting.

Bonus photo: the latest addition to the to read pile. Isn’t it beautiful? And it’s signed. And I got a Reading is Fundamental print too. Thank you Foyles.

Copy of The Art of Drag

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Book of the Week, new releases, women's fiction

Book of the Week: The Miseducation of Evie Epworth

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Weird week in reading really. Tried a new series, finished another series, read some self-help/empowerment, continued my binge of Inspector Littlejohn. Didn’t finish a few other things I should have done, and didn’t like the new Kevin Kwan enough to write about it here. So. This is not quite a new release – but nearly. It came out in July, but of course I have only just got to it because: reading slump, indecision, too much choice etc.

Cover of the Miseducation of Evie Epworth

It’s 1962, and sixteen-year-old Evie is standing on the edge of adulthood, but the fastest milk bottle delivery girl in East Yorkshire doesn’t know what to do with her life.  She’s dreaming of the bright lights of London, but she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life and her two Adam Faith posters (brooding Adam and sophisticated Adam) don’t have any answers for her. But before she can go anywhere, she has a few problems demanding her attention: her widowed father has fallen prey to a much younger woman, who Evie is fairly sure is a gold digger – and it’s putting the family farm under threat. In her quest to save the family, she makes friends with one of her neighbours and starts to discover life beyond rural England.

This took me a bit longer to get into than I was expecting, but once I was in, I was in. There was some early talk of magic and spells that threw me because it wasn’t what I was expecting, but it sorted itself out quite fast. I liked Evie’s voice and I really enjoyed discovering her world. It’s written as her diary, which means there’s a lot of fun as a reader in spotting the stuff that she’s missing because of her age and (relative) innocence. All the side characters are well drawn, and often hilarious, and I really enjoyed watching Evie’s future come together and seeing how everything worked out. It’s not perfect, but it’s lots of fun and laugh out loud funny at times. I’ll be looking to see what Matson Taylor writes next.

My copy of The Miseducation of Evie Epworth came from NetGalley, but it is a bargain 99p on Kindle and Kobo at the moment. It’s also out in audiobook and hardback and as it has got some quite impressive names on the blurbs and it’s a Radio 2 book club book so I’m hoping it’ll be easy to find in stores. And the cover is great so you should be able to spot it fairly easily if it is there.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 24 – August 30

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 I can’t believe that it’s the end of August today. I mean. Where did the summer go? Anyway, book of the week coming up tomorrow, mini reviews on Wednesday, August stats on Thursday and that’s your week. Or at least I think it is!

Read:

Paper Girls Vol 6 by Brian K Vaughan et al

The Miseducation of Evie Epworth by Matson Taylor*

Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan

Fall into Death by Emily Toll

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Toll the Bell for Murder by George Bellairs

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Started:

Uneasy Lies the Crown by Tasha Alexander

Still reading:

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

 Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi*

Real Men Knit by Kwana Johnson

Still not counting.

Bonus photo: my cousin’s dog’s puppies are growing, and their mum has the haunted, sleep deprived, what on earth hit me look of new mums every where.

A cocker spaniel and her puppies.

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Book of the Week, fiction, historical, new releases

Book of the Week: V for Victory

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So as mentioned yesterday, a bit of a strange week of reading last week, but today’s BotW pick was a real joy. And for the second week in a row, it’s a book that’s actually coming out in the next few days. So I am both timely and slightly ahead of the game. Make a note, it doesn’t happen often – and two weeks in a row is a real rarity!

Cover of V for Victory

It’s 1944 and in their house on Hampstead Heath, Vee Sedge and her fifteen year old “ward” Noel are just about scraping by with a house full of lodgers selected for what they can teach Noel more than their ability to pay. When Vee witnesses a road accident and is called to court disaster beckons – as Vee is not actually the person she is pretending to be. As the household tries not to get its hopes up too far that the end of the war is in sight, Noel and Vee move towards a new future.

This is the third (and final?) book about this group of characters and ties together the story of Noel and Vee as we saw them in Crooked Heart, with Mattie from Old Baggage. I’ve written several different sentences to explain that fact and have settled on that slightly vague one as being the way not to give too much away about the other two. Now you could read this standalone, but you’ll get so much more from this if you’ve read the other two. And why wouldn’t you want to read the other two – Crooked Heart is Goodnight Mr Tom but if Mr Tom was the female equivalent of Private Walker and Old Baggage is about a feisty but ageing former suffragette looking for a new cause to fight for. Both were books of the week here, that’s how much Iiked them – and liked this to be coming back for a third mention!

V for Victory is funny and warm and moving and made me cry at the end. I mean what more could you want from a book? It also does really well at capturing the shades of grey of wartime – and of people in general. It’s just wonderful and a perfect read for a grey and miserable day. And we’ve had a few of those in the last week. I mean I’m writing this on the train to work, wearing welly boots and with a mac because it’s raining like it’s November in mid-August!

My copy of V for Victory came from NetGalley , but I’ll be buying a paperback once that comes out so I have the set. It’s out on Thursday in hardback (here’s a Foyles link), Kindle and Kobo. I still haven’t been into a bookshop in person, but I think that the last one was fairly easy to get hold of in bookstores, so I hope this will be too.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 17 – August 23

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So some progress on the still reading list, but maybe not as much as I wanted. I had a bit of decision making fatigue at the end of the week and over the weekend and found it hard to pick a book and stick to it. Hey ho, it seems to be my new normal during the quarantimes to be honest.

Read:

We Germans by Alexander Starritt*

Bones in the Wilderness by George Bellairs

The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper

V for Victory by Lissa Evans*

To Helvetica and Back by Paige Shelton

A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro

Blue Rosette by Pamela MacGregor-Morris

Started:

Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi*

Fall into Death by Emily Toll

Real Men Knit by Kwana Johnson

Toll the Bell for Murder by George Bellairs

Still reading:

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

The Miseducation of Evie Epworth by Matson Taylor*

Still not counting. Still don’t care.

Bonus photo: My lovely sunflowers. So bright,so friendly, such a mood lifter.

A large bunch of sunflowers in a jug

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Book of the Week, crime, new releases

Book of the Week: The Moonflower Murders

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A productive week in reading last week as you can see from the list. I finished the new Vinyl Detective, which was great – but I think you need to be reading those in order. Check out my review of Written in Dead Wax – which is the first in the series – and as the series has gone on, the women have become more well-rounded and developed which I think maybe means I was being insightful?! Anyway today’s BotW is also new fiction and this is actually out on Thursday this week, so for once I’m ahead of time!

Cover of The Moonflower Murders

Retired publisher Susan Ryeland has a new life in Greece, where she is running a small hotel with her boyfriend. But when a couple at the hotel tell her about a murder that happened at their hotel on the day of their daughter’s wedding, she is intrigued. And then when she finds out that the daughter is now missing after saying that the wrong man was convicted and that she’s worked it out because of one of the books that Susan published, she returns to the UK to try and find out what has happened. Her investigation takes her from London to Suffolk and to the pages of 1950s Devon.

This is the sequel to Magpie Murders, and although I think this will work better if you’ve read the first book, I actually liked this more. Like the first book, it features a book-within-a-book and it’s really clever and super meta. It’s also super hard to explain in a review. In Magpie Murders, Susan found herself investigating the death of one of her authors who was famous for writing a series of novels about a 1950s detective called Atticus Pünd. The books were homages to Golden Age crime, but the author – Alan Conway – hated writing them (but no one wanted to publish his other stuff) so he wove in references to people that he knew and events in real life to entertain himself. In Magpie Murders the book within the book is Conway’s final Atticus Pünd novel, in Moonflower Murders, it is an earlier book in the series, which turns out to be similarly peppered with clues. It’s a really interesting reading experience. It’s easy to get lost in the Pünd story and forget that you’re meant to be reading it because Susan is reading it looking for clues to the “real” case. The Pünd novel is a satisfying mystery – and so is the “real” mystery that Susan is looking into. It’s such a fun and also mind bending reading experience.

My copy of the Moonflower Murders came from NetGalley, but it’s out on Thursday in hardback, Kindle and Kobo. Horowitz is a big name, so I’d expect you to be able to find physical copies of this fairly easily in bookstores and maybe the supermarkets.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 10 – August 16

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Another week, another post where the still reading list is quite long. I am working on it, but as with several other points in the Quarantimes I’m finding it hard to concentrate at times, and move towards lighter books with guaranteed resolutions.

Read:

The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

Death March for Penelope Blow by George Bellairs*

The Vinyl Detective: Low Action by Andrew Cartmel

The Next Always by Nora Roberts

Welcome to Moonlight Harbor by Sheila Roberts

Sweet Home Montana by Shann McPherson*

Ice Cream Lover by Jackie Lau

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things by Robin Muir

The Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz*

Started:

We Germans by Alexander Starritt*

To Helvetica and Back by Paige Shelton

The Miseducation of Evie Epworth by Matson Taylor*

Still reading:

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro

Still not counting.

Bonus photo: I give you summer in the United Kingdom: at the start of the week in the mid 30s, by the end of the week – this…

rain in a park

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: Daring and the Duke

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The well-informed may have spotted the final books in two series on my reading list yesterday. The final book in the Wells and Wong series – which sees the girls take a Nile cruise – and the last in Sarah MacLean’s Bareknuckle Bastards series. This week’s BotW is the latter – because it’s an epic grovelling book and that turned out to be exactly what I needed last week.

Paperback copy of Daring and the Duke

The Daring of the name is Grace, queen of Covent Garden and the Duke is Ewan, who betrayed her when they were children and who Grace’s brothers have been hiding her from ever since. Ewan has been searching for Grace for a decade – and was told that she was dead – and has been busy trying to ruin her brothers in revenge ever since. But now he knows she’s alive and he’s determined to win her back and make her his duchess. If you haven’t read the first three books in the series, that already sounds like a lot of grovelling is going to be needed, but if you have read Wicked and the Wallflower and Brazen and the Beast it feels going into this like it will be impossible to redeem Ewan. Which is what makes this book so intriguing.

And it mostly delivers. I think if MacLean didn’t have such strong form for series ending novels I would have been even more enthusiastic but  it’s not quite as brilliant a redemption as MacLean’s previous epic-grovel series ender Day of the Duchess or the big reveal general epicness of Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover – which came off the back of a cliffhanger moment so big that you almost couldn’t believe it had been done. But Grace is a great character (also her business organisation is a lot of fun) and peeling back the layers and finding out what happened to Ewan is very satisfying.  We continue to be in difficult times and a bit of escapist reading in early Victorian London with plenty of grovelling as well as actual boxing makes for a strangely calming experience. Or at least it did for me.

I’ve written before that I’m trying not to save up books by my favourite authors anymore because my tastes change and I end up missing out on books that I would have enjoyed at the time but that now don’t float my boat. And previously this would probably have been a book that I would have saved for a time of need, but to be honest all of coronavirus life is pretty much a Time of Need, so I wasn’t going to risk saving it. I’ve also had a recent run of disappointing reads from new books by authors who I usually love, which means it was also a real relief that this was so good and did what I was hoping it would do.

Coronavirus also means that there was no Sarah MacLean meet up for me to go to this year, so instead I treated myself to a signed copy of Daring and the Duke  from Sarah MacLean’s local bookstore in Brooklyn, Word bookstore – but you should be able to get hold of the UK edition (which looks substantially more ethereal and floaty than these books are) from your usual purveyor of books (I can’t promise it’ll be in stock though, it might be an order) or in Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Bonus picture: it was a sunny week outside and there was also a bit of a sunshine-y theme in the look of my reading!

Copies of Daring and the Duke, Death Sets Sail and The Vinyl Detective

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 3 – August 9

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Such a hot week. Sometimes all I wanted to do was find a cool area and read. But I also had a fairly busy week, so that wasn’t actually always possible…

Read:

The Clutter Corpse by Simon Brett

Daring and the Duke by Sarah MacLean

Paper Girls Vol 5 by Brian K Vaughan et al

Dance Away with Me by Susan Elizabeth Philips

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Death Sets Sail by Robin Stevens

Murder Makes Mistakes by George Bellairs

Started:

The Vinyl Detective: Low Action by Andrew Cartmel

Dead March for Penelope Blow by George Bellairs*

The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

Still reading:

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things by Robin Muir

A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro

Still not counting, still don’t care.

Bonus photo: here’s one of my cousin’s cocker spaniel puppies. It’s the most adorable photo I have this week, maybe this year.

A cocker spaniel puppy

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley