This week I wanted to mention that there’s a new Sarah Adler out. According to the blurb, Nina is suddenly single, unemployed and back living with her parents. Quentin was her childhood crush and is also back in town. He wants to resume their treasure hunt from years ago – and both of them could use the reward. But the treasure hunt is the reason the two of them fell out in the first place, so their shared past may not be able to stay hidden.
Both Mrs Nash’s Ashes and Happy Medium were books of the week so I’m looking forward to reading this one – and I have a preorder waiting for me when I get home!
We are nearly at the halfway point in the year, so I thought today I would take the opportunity to mention my favourite reads of 2025 so far. Now it should be noted that these are not all new books and I think principally that’s because I’ve had a few absolutely chronic binge reads that means that I’ve just read less other stuff all together so the mix of new to old is very much skewed in favour of the old at the halfway mark of the year.
I’m going to start with the not new stuff, because there is more of it. Lets start with the a murder mystery and A Case of Mice and Murder. This is an edwardian era mystery set in essentially a closed community – the barristers of the Temple. I loved it and have recommended it a few times now. The sequel is out next month and is just as good. Next up is Legends and Lattes, which is sort of Terry Pratchett-esque but with very low takes and a very cozy vibe. I still need to read the second book in the series, which is a prequel and there is a third book coming in the autumn. And then there is On Turpentine Lane a fun romantic comedy with a mystery subplot that had me smiling and laughing the whole way through. And obviously the main binge was that six week period where I read the entire Dr Ruth Galloway series, so I should really mention those as well.
On the new book front, my favourite is probably The Favourites, which is one of the better portrayals of figure skating in fiction. I’ve seen a lot of other skating fans who have enjoyed it too, but really is a melodrama about intertwined relationships that uses the sport as a driving factor – you definitely don’t need to know the difference between an axel and a salchow to enjoy this (particularly as it’s set in ice dance and they don’t do jumps!). I also really enjoyed Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest short story collection, Show Don’t Tell. I remain someone who prefers novels to short stories, but I like Sittenfeld’s writing and ideas so much and this is really good, especially if you’ve read Prep because you get to revisit the characters years down the line. There are a couple more new releases that I’ve enjoyed but that are later books in series which usually means I don’t review them because: spoilers. But the latest Vinyl Detective was a return to form and was a BotW pick and Murder Below Deck, the second Paul Delamere book was also a really fun read.
It’s Tuesday and I’m back with another murder mystery for my book of the Week pick. And it’s a wintery one despite the fact that it’s a heatwave here. Does reading a book about cold weather make you feel better or worse in situations about this? Who knows. Anyway.
The set up here is that Torben Helle and a group of his university friends have been invited for a reunion by the most successful of their group, a man who because super rich after his invention took off. They haven’t really spent time together as a group in the ten years since they graduated but in snowy Northumbria they reassemble. The morning after their arrival they are snowed in and their host is dead in his bed. One of them must of done it – but who? Torben and his knowledge of Golden Age murder mysteries (and his closest friends in the group) set out to solve the crime.
As we all know at this point, I love a murder mystery – and I especially love a country house murder mystery so this was right up my street. The pacing is a little slow, but I liked the characters and the idea of a group of previously close friends brought back together. I saw a few of the twists coming, but I was ultimately pretty satisfied with the way that it all worked out. And I loved all the references to classic murder mysteries – because of course loads of them were books that I’ve read (some of them read multiple times!).
My copy came via NetGalley (yes, I know, I know, I know) but it’s out now in Kindle and Kobo. I’ve seen the sequel in the shops and would definitely give it a read to see if the pacing improves when there isn’t so much heavy lifting to do in the set up.
A really, really busy week. A trip to the theatre, plus the arrival of series 2 of America’s Sweethearts plus a busy weekend means not as much progress on some of the long runners as I would have liked, but I did get one more off the list. Also it’s been so hot and it’s so hard to concentrate (and to sleep) when it’s that muggy. Fingers crossed that it’s warm but not humid this week…
One of my favourite documentary series from last year is back! We have a second season of America’s Sweethearts, Netflix’s documentary about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. I wrote a whole post about last year’s series – and I think you really need to watch that one to get the most out of season two, and I say that as someone who is only two episodes into the new season. So do go and read my post from last year and then go and watch it. As I said last year so many people I know watched it who aren’t into sport but also people who are really into sport but not into dance – the first series was just a really good documentary. I’m not sure how series two can live up to that, but I’m excited to see it try! Oh and in case you’re wondering – the original subreddit still hasn’t come to terms with the fact the change to the series compared to the CMT one…
It’s the end of Independent Bookshop Week today, and given how much I love a bookshop, it would be remiss of me not to mention it, and also to drop some links to my posts about Indies I’ve been to, and also some of the ones that are on my list for a visit!
In my regular visiting spots we have Bookends/Bookcase in Carlisle and then the various Daunts in London near where I work and stay – Marylebone and Cheapside. There are also still a few second hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road, but a lot less than there used to be. London has now got a romance specialist bookshop, Saucy Books, which is over in Notting Hill so I’m going to have to head over there soon.
And of course if you’re in the South West, you need to be going to Persephone.
If you’ve got some more book shop recommendations, whack them in the comments.
So back in November last year I did a post about Ellie Alexander’s Secret Bookcase series after the release of book four, but this week the final book in the series, A Body at the Book Fair, came out and I wanted to return for a quick update. First a recap of the set up: Annie works at a specialist mystery bookshop in a small town in California, but she actually trained as a criminologist before her best friend was murdered during their final project. In each book in the series she’s solving a murder of the week, but also inching closer to solving the mystery of what happened to her friend.
Back in November, I was getting fed up with waiting for the resolution of the murder and enjoying the murders of the week more. And as the series went on on, the mysteries the books have been trying to solve seemed to get less complex because of the need to move the other story on. But until the final instalment, the books had had mostly been satisfying on one front or the other: either the murder of the week was good or the progress on the background investigation made up for it. But in book six I’m not sure either side of the story works – the mystery-of-the-week is very thin, and the background mystery felt a bit anticlimactic too, for reasons which I can’t really explain without giving you spoilers.
At the end of the final book there is a note from Ellie Alexander saying that there is a spin off series coming in 2026 called The Novel Detectives, featuring Annie and her friends. And as I still like the characters and the set up, I’m hoping that this will be much more of a the murder of the week but with developments in their personal lives as the running strand and will get back to what I liked about the earlier books. I’ll be looking out for the first one anyway and will keep you posted!
Welcome to Glorious Tuga was a book of the week almost a year ago, and today the sequel is out. It’s planned as a trilogy, so don’t go expecting everything to be resolved at the end of this one but the blurb is promising the arrival on the island of Charlotte’s mother, determined to drag her daughter back home to England and the career Lucinda thinks her daughter ought to have. I loved the characters as well as the setting when I read the first book, so I’m looking forward where we go next. I’m hoping that the angst level stays pretty low (similar levels to book one please) because that’s what I need in my reading at the moment! I saw the first book in a bunch of shops last year so I’m hoping this one should be fairly easy to find.
Side note: you’ll noticee that we’ve got a new cover style since last year – the first one got a redesign with the arrival of the paperback and the sequel has followed that. I think it’s really pretty but it’s bad news for those who have the first in hardback and like a matching set…
I’m trying to be timely this week – there’s a drama series about to start about the Mitford sisters, so I’ve been back through my reading lists to come up with some ideas for anyone who watches the series and wants to know more!
So lets start off with Nancy Mitford’s own The Pursuit of Love. The Radletts are based on Nancy’s own family and you follow them through their adventures and love affairs in the years between the Wars. It’s a funny and smart social satire and I raced through this when I first read it, and went straight on to Love in a Cold Climate. Nancy was one of the Bright Young Things after she made her society debut and her writing (like her friend Evelyn Waugh’s) is full of real people and incidents that she has fictionalised – some times very, very lightly.
Jessica Mitford also wrote her own memoir of the family – Hons and Rebels. Now if you watched the trailer for outrageous above, you may have noticed that there was a lot of competing politics going on among the siblings. And Decca was the communist (as opposed to Diana who was the Fascist) and so her memoir is very much coming at it all from the perspective of someone who disagrees with the aristocracy and privilege that her family had. She’s not as witty as Nancy, but she’s also maybe not as mean as Nancy could be.
I read Harold Acton’s biography of Nancy years ago, but I have never got around to Mary Lovell’s Mitford Girls even though I’ve got her Riviera Set on the keepers shelf. So I’m going to take this as a cue that it’s time to finally get around to that, and borrow mum’s copy and read it! But I have read D J Taylor’s Bright Young Things, which covers several of the sisters as it surveys the hedonistic generation of party goers who it has to be said were mostly Not Great People.
Talking of Not Great People, I should add that I have read one of Diana’s books – her biography of the Duchess of Windsor and I do not recommend. Diana was in the Duchess’s social circle and the final line of my good reads review is “Worth reading if only as a lesson to retain your critical faculties when you read any non fiction book to remind yourself what the author’s objectives may be.” Which is to say that it was even more biased than I was expecting it to be, and I was expecting it to be really quite biased. Nany however was actually a good biographer – and her book about Madame De Pompadour is actually pretty good.
If 1920s/1930s society is your sort of wheelhouse, you might also want to check out my Happy Valley Set and non-fiction Rich People Problems recommendsdays and if you’ve got any recommendations for me, please do put them in the comments.
I previewed this one last week as it came out – and I’ve since finished it so I’m coming back around to give a review because it is a really great set up and a really nice read.
And so the set up: Miss Hortense is a retired nurse who lives in a Birmingham suburb after coming to the UK from Jamaica in 1960. When a body turns up in the home of one of her acquaintances, she is drawn into investigating. She’s pretty fearless – she’s had to be to survive more than three decades in nursing and living in an area that wasn’t exactly welcoming when she first arrived. A lot of the signs point to a connection to the Pardner network, which she was instrumental in setting up back in the 1960s soon after her arrival when the Jamaican community were struggling to get help from banks. But she left the pardner under a cloud years ago. For years Miss Hortense has been at the centre of the community, she knows all the histories and a lot of secrets but the investigation leads her into areas she would rather not think about, and dangers that she thought she had put behind her.
I really enjoyed this – Miss Hortense is very independent and self-reliant, and somewhat abrasive at times, but she makes for a fascinating lens to look at a very tight-knit community that is hiding plenty of secrets. I really liked the language and the also the fact that it has a different setting to so many murder mysteries and doesn’t info dump you with stuff, it expects you to be smart enough to figure things out already or go and find out. I went off down a rabbit hole about pardner schemes because I had never heard of them before, which was fascinating, but it’s also such a great (and realistic) device to be causing tension in a community. I read this in less than a day, and would happily return to the world of Miss Hortense – and I hope that there is a sequel. She’s certainly well placed to be able to investigate something else…
My copy came from NetGalley, but this is out now on Kindle and Kobo and in hardback. I will be keeping an eye out in the bookshops to see if I can spot it in person so to speak.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 