Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: 40-Love

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I’ve got some Christmas recommendations coming up tomorrow, but in the meantime, here’s something completely different: a holiday romance set in Florida. Never let it be said that I don’t mix things up!

Cover of 40-Love

Assistant principal Tess Dunn is spending part of her summer vacation at a resort in Florida to celebrate her birthday. She’s splitting her time between the beach and planning for the promotion that she wants, but the point is that she went on holiday at all right? One morning, she’s in the sea when a wave takes her bikini top (no laughing matter) and she uses the nearest person as a human shield to protest her modesty. That nearest person is Lucas Karlsson. He’s currently the resort’s tennis pro, but behind his flirty demeanor he’s recovering from the premature end of his top level playing career. In an attempt to match make, Tess’s friend buys her some lessons with Lucas, and the sparks fly. But Tess has just turned 40 and Lucas is 26, and they only have two weeks to get to know each other. Is this just a holiday fling or could it be a long term thing?

I was about to say that I don’t read a lot of age gap romances, except that almost every traditional Regency you’ll ever read features an older man and a fresh out of the school room debutant. So it would be more accurate to say that I don’t read a lot of age gap contemporaries and very few of those feature an older woman. And this made a really nice change. Tess is a fun heroine who knows what she wants and how she’s going to get it, and Lucas’s tennis career means that he’s more mature than perhaps your average 26 year old man. As a pair they are delightful and it was really entertaining watching them get to know each other and break down their defences. It’s funny, it’s flirty, it’s sexy – but it also has a relatable core and deals with some real world issues in a compassionate way.

In the grand scheme of things – and the grand scheme of romance novels, 40-love is very low angst. Lucas is absolutely the polar opposite of the Alpha-hole romance trope. He’s kind, he’s emotionally fluent and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that there’s no Big Stupid Thing that either of them do to the other. The conflict here is entirely about whether they’re going to work together when they get to know each other – not that one is hiding something big, or has done something dumb. And given the state of the universe at the moment, this is the sort of conflict that I feel emotionally ready to deal with! This isn’t my first Olivia Dade – I read Spoiler Alert a few weeks back, which was also a lot of fun and has some of the same elements of interesting non-typical romance characters – perhaps against expectations given the fact that the hero is the star of a show that I’m going to call Not Game Of Thrones, and there are a couple of references to that in this too which is a nice easter egg to find.

My copy of 40-Love came from the library, but you can buy it now on Kindle or Kobo or as a paperback, but it looks like its a print on demand type situation – although you can get Spoiler Alert from Waterstones much more easily.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: December 14 – December 20

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I’m basically at the stage where my brain can’t cope with anything complicated anymore, so it’s all romances and murder mysteries, some of them with a Christmas twist. Sorry, not sorry.

Read:

Rage by Bob Woodward

In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren

Checkmate to Murder by E C R Lorac

40-Love by Olivia Dade

The Wedding Piper by Isabel Rogers

Snapped by Alexa Martin

The Prince and the Troll by Rainbow Rowell

Gift of the Magpie by Donna Andrews

Started:

The Trouble with Mistletoe by Jill Shalvis

Still reading:

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

Murder on Mustique by Anne Glenconner*

The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency by Minna Lindgren

Still not counting, still don’t care

Bonus photo: is this the most exciting reading material I acquired last week? Possibly! It’s the Christmas Radio Times, so I can plan my festive viewing

Copy of the Radio Times Christmas edition

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, detective

Book of the Week: Sick as a Parrot

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A big of week in reading last week, with some Christmas stuff you’ll hear about anon. Or at least I hope you will. Anyway, back to some old school crime this week for my BotW pick.

Copy of Sick as a Parrot on the Crime bookshelf

Sick as a Parrot is the fifth book in Liz Evans’s series featuring somewhat unconventional private investigator and ex-cop Grace Smith. Grace’s latest client is Hannah Conti, a young woman who has recently discovers that she is adopted and that her natural mother was convicted of murder. Hannah wants Grace to clear her mother’s name. And so Grace is drawn into the very messy murder of a school teacher two decades ago that no one wants re-examining. Meanwhile Grace is also pet-sitting a neurotic parrot and despite all her best efforts she also has an incredibly unreconstructed former colleague sleeping in her spare room.

This is the second book in this series that I’ve read (the other one being Who Killed Marilyn Monroe, the first in the series) and they’re both on the edge of gritty with an enjoyable side of black humour. They were written in the mid 2000s and that gives them an enjoyably low tech and low fi edge. Grace is a fun heroine – enjoyably flawed and smart in someways – but not in others. There are some common threads in this book from the first one too which have clearly been developing nicely in the interim which I’d like to go back for. And there’s an interesting romantic thread in this that means I really want to read the sixth and final book in the series.

So this is where it gets tricky. This is an older book which I picked it up secondhand, I think at a National Trust book stall. So you’ll have to hunt for it. But you never know, you might find one of the other books in the series while you’re at it. Some of the series have been republished on Kindle with new titles – you can find the box set of the first three here and some of them are even in Kindle Unlimited, if that’s a thing you have. Who Killed Marilyn Monroe is available on Kobo, but it’s the only one I could find there sadly.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: December 7 – December 13

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Started some Christmas reading this week – from the to-read bookshelf – and then carried on with a few other bits and bobs from the shelf.  It’s been cold and miserable and so it’s been prime curl up on the couch with a book weather really!

Read:

Sick as a Parrot by Liz Evans

Diving Adventure by Willard Price

Golden Rules of Acting by Andy Nyman

I Heard the Banshee Sing by Paul Charles

More Golden Rules of Acting by Andy Nyman

Murder at Christmas ed Cecily Gayford

Build Your Own Christmas Movie Romance by Riane Konc

The Fatal Flying Affair by T E Kinsey

The Naughty List by Ellie Mae MacGregor

My Last Duchess by Eloisa James

Started:

The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency by Minna Lindgren

Still reading:

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

Murder on Mustique by Anne Glenconner*

Checkmate to Murder by E C R Lorac

Still not counting, still don’t care

Bonus photo: the latest addition to my bookshelves – a copy of Veronica at the Wells in hardback.  This was the first of the Wells series that I read back when I was about 11, and is now the last one to finish off my set of hardbacks. I’m so excited.

Hardback copy of Veronica at the Wells

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, Fantasy

Book of the Week: Guilty Pleasures

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As I mentioned yesterday I read a bunch of books last week for my missing states for my Read Across America challenge and today’s Book of the Week was one of them.

Cover of Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures is the first in Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. In a world where vampires have been legalised, Anita is an animator in St Louis, where she raises the dead and she helps kill members of the undead who have gone too far. Then the head of the city’s vampires asks her to solve a series of killings and she’s unable to say no. Soon she’s drawn into a new part of the world of the supernatural.

So, as previously mentioned, I have a mixed record with supernatural stories. I love the first 3 series of Buffy, like the next two and then lose patience with everything except Once More With Feeling and Tabula Rasa after the end of season five*. I raced through the Sookie Stackhouse series (and as I was reading it around the time the final book came out, I didn’t have years to get attached to one particular outcome and so was a rare person who wasn’t angry at the ending) but have struggled to find supernatural series I like outside of Charlaine Harris and Darynda Jones. I think my issues are usually when the series are too dark and angsty and too close to horror. But I do come through with every now and again and try. Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires was too horror for me. Alice James’s Grave Secrets had a good set up but didn’t do it for me in the execution. But this one was just about in the sweet spot. It was nearly a bit too violent, and didn’t quite have enough relationships/romance but I raced through it and enjoyed it. It doesn’t waste time with any explanations though – it really just does dump you into the world and leave you to work it out. Which is a choice, and obviously massive info dumps are bad, but when I stopped to think about it I wasn’t always quite sure how everything worked. But while I was reading, I didn’t mind!

For all that I’m only reading it now, this is actually 16 years old (just a couple of years younger than the True Blood series) and is still going, with the 28th book in the series due out in early 2021. This seemed like it was definitely setting up a love interest, so I shall probably read at least one or two more to see where it goes, but I’m not sure that I’m ready to commit to another mega long series at the moment.

My copy of Guilty Pleasures came from the library, but you can get hold of it in Kindle and on Kobo, as well as in paperback – bookshop.org.uk seem to have stock, but I don’t know if you’ll find it in stores.

Happy Reading!

*we’ve recently done a rewatch so I can confirm the accuracy of this.

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: November 30 – December 6

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I think I ticked off six of my missing stars last week – so maybe I’ll finish the challenge after all? Anyway, a cold and wintry week mean lots of reading.

Read:

Giraffe and Flamingo by Curtis Sittenfeld

Hope Never Dies by Andrew Shaffer

Strangled Prose by Joan Hess

Mary Anne Saves the Day by Anne M Martin and Raina Telgemaier

Man Hands by Sarina Bowen

Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K Hamilton

Dakota Born by Debbie Macomber

Pollyanna by Eleanor H Porter

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

The Bloomsbury Group by Frances Spalding

Started:

Checkmate to Murder by E C R Lorac

Still reading:

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

Murder on Mustique by Anne Glenconner*

Sick as a Parrot by Liz Evans

Still not counting, still don’t care

Bonus photo: my dad took this of sunset out in the village last week. It may look like somewhere exotic, but it is in fact Northamptonshire!

Fiery red, orange and yellow sunset with silhouetted trees on the edge of the sky line

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

books, stats

November Stats

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New books read this month: 35*

Books from the to-read pile: 5

Ebooks read: 16

NetGalley books read: 4

Library books: 10

Non-fiction books: 4

Favourite book this month: Life, Death and Cellos by Isabel Rogers (and the sequel Bold as Brass!)

Most read author: Barbara Ross – six books in the Maine Clambake series!

Books bought: still not counting

Books read in 2020: 353

Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 581

Bonus picture: Central London during lockdown – this was lunchtime on Sunday the 15th, which would usually have been shopper central.

View down Oxford Street to Oxford Circus

Bonus picture 2 – the read across the US map – will I manage 10 states in the next month? I feel like it may be a bridge too far…

*Includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels (4 this month)

book round-ups

Recommendsday: Mini Reviews from November

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Another month of this super weird year is over. Just a few weeks now until we can kiss goodbye to 2020 and hopefully 2021 will be better. I mean 2020 has thrown everything at us, so surely there can’t be quite as much going on right? I mean I feel nervous just writing that, because this year has done such a number on everyone! Anyway, a few old friends in this month’s post and some new ideas too.

Vanderbeekers Lost and Found by Karina Yan Glaser

Cover of Vanderbeekers Lost and Found

I’ve written about this series before, but Karina Yan Glaser’s Vanderbeeker books continue to be a total delight. This fourth installment sees the gang helping Mr Biederman prepare to run in the New York marathon when they discover that someone is sleeping in the community garden’s shed. When they discover it is someone that they know (and love) they set about trying to fix the problem, in inimitable Vanderbeeker style. This installment also deals with grief and loss as one of the longer running storylines develops in a way that the grownups amongst us have seen coming, but does it in a very sensitive and caring way – as you’d expect – but which also provides a framework for younger readers who might (well almost certainly will) find themselves in a similar situation.

The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz*

Cover of the Sentence is Death

So Anthony Horowitz has two very meta series going at the moment. The Moonflower Murders from the other series was a BotW back in August, and if anything this is maybe the weirder – with Horowitz himself featuring as the protagonist, writing a book about Hawthorne, an ex-cop turned private investigator and police consultant. The murder mystery is good, Hawthorne is intriguingly dislikeable and “Anthony” is a good narrator. Horowitz has made himself an endearingly stupid Watson to Hawthorne’s Holmes. I think on balance I prefer the Susan Ryeland series, with their book within a book structure, but these are a good read and I will happily read more of these, if/when they materialise.

Help Yourself by Curtis Sittenfeld

 Copy of Help Yourself

Curtis Sittenfeld is another author that I’ve written about here before and this is three more short stories from her. They look at racism and suburbia, a film crew running into trouble on a shoot in the Mid-West and a squabbling group of aspiring authors waiting to hear who has got the best scholarships on their MA programme. I think they’re all from angles that you wouldn’t quite expect and make you think as well as make you laugh. Would make a lovely stocking filler book for one of the readers in your life.

First World War Poets by Alan Judd and David Crane

Copy of First World War Poets

A slightly left-field choice for my last pick and another that would make a good stocking filler. I’m not really a poetry person, but the War Poets are the ones that i do like and where I can genuinely believe that the writers really did put in all those layers of meaning that teachers tell you about when you study them (like I did at A Level back in the day). This is a really lovelt little book from the National Portrait Gallery with short biographies of the key figures along with pictures of them from the NPG collection and one of their poems. I have another book from this series about the Bloomsbury Group that I’m looking forward to reading at some point when I’m slightly less behind on my various yearly reading challenges. The Portrait Gallery is my favourite of the London Galleries and as well as museums hing been shut for most of the year the NPG is now closed for refurbishment until 2023, so books like this and the virtual collection are the only way we’re going to be able to enjoy it for a while.

And that’s your lot for this month. If you’ve missed the previous posts, here are the mini-reviews for the rest of the year: October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February and January. And just in case you missed them, here are the Books of the Week from November: Love, Death and Cellos, Grumpy Jake, Someone to Romance and Boiled Over.

Happy Reading!

*an asterix next to a title means it came from NetGalley, in return for an honest review (however belated that might be) ** means it was an advance copy that came some other way

American imports, Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: Well Met

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Well here we are at the start of December, and I’m recommending a romance again. Because what we all need when it’s cold outside is something that warms your insides. I mean it’s also set in summer in Maryland (another state ticked off!) so it might make you nostalgic for hot weather too, but you can’t have everything.

Cover of Well Met

The heroine of Well Met is Emily, who has rushed to help her sister and her niece after a car crash. And Emily soon finds herself roped in as volunteer at the town’s Renaissance faire. She’s only there because her niece needs an adult to accompany her, but she’s soon enjoying herself – or she would be if it wasn’t for Simon – high school teacher in the week and Ren Faire killjoy at the weekends. But when rehearsals are over and the Faire gets underway for real, Simon is transformed into a pirate and Emily is a tavern wench and the two of them can’t stop flirting. Is it just a summer fling or will Emily put down roots in Willow Creek?

First of all let it be said that Emily’s ex boyfriend is awful and should go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collection £200*. Secondly this is a lovely, sweet slow burn romance with a side of self discovery for Emily. Simon is an intriuging character, and although I joined the dots on bits of his backstory faster that Emily did, I think that I was meant to. I’ve never been to a Rennaissance Faire – I’ve done a couple of living history type events, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing –  but that’s not a problem because it’s so well described that you can really picture it. I am basically assuming that all of their “English” accents are as awful as a group of Brits trying to do American accents would be though! The side characters are all great – and I’m looking forward to seeing what Jen DeLuca does with them in the next books in the series. The good news is that this came out a couple of years back (because as ever I am behind the curve) so the sequel is already out, with the third one planned for 2021.

You can get a copy of Well Met on Kindle or Kobo or audiobook. There is a paperback – but it looks like it’s an US-import type situation, so it may not be available in your normal bookshop.

Happy Reading!

* that’s a monopoly reference

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: November 23 – November 29

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Another steady week in reading as I attempt to finish all my reading challenges but get distracted by shiny new books and library holds. And once again, the end of the month is timed to annoy me! Book of the week as per usual tomorrow, Mini-reviews on Wednesday and Stats on Thursday seems to be the order of the day. Where has this year gone and also how has this year been forever?

Read:

Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz*

Can’t Even by Anne Helen Petersen

Well Met by Jen Deluca

Gluten-Free Murder by P D Workman

Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade

Treasure by Rebekah Weatherspoon

Twisted Twenty-Six by Janet Evanovich

Started:

Giraffe and Flamingo by Curtis Sittenfeld

Hope Never Dies by Andrew Shaffer

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Still reading:

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

Murder on Mustique by Anne Glenconner*

Sick as a Parrot by Liz Evans

Still not counting, still don’t care

Bonus photo: we’ve reached the Misty, foggy, cold part of the year when I always want a fire in the evenings so I’m cursing that one of the covid-complications has been that the chimney people haven’t been able to come and fix the top of the sitting room chimney so I don’t dare light a fire, because 2020 has already been bad enough without burning the house down…

Misty morning in the 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