After talking about the new H M The Queen Investigates book a couple of weeks ago, today it’s the turn of another Royal-related historical mystery series – Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness books which has reached number 19 – with From Cradle to Grave – which came out on Tuesday. I remain surprised and delighted that Bowen continues to find more set ups for murders for Georgie to solve, but also that she’s continuing to put out multiple books a year despite being in her 80s. Anyway the blurb for this latest installment has nanny problems (more accurately sister in law problems) as well as a string of deaths which may threaten Georgie’s beloved husband Darcy. I am up to date with this series – and always wonder if the next book will be the last but surely Bowen wouldn’t finish on a strange number like 19 when 20 is right there? Right?
It’s the middle of the week again and I’m back with some more murder mysteries, but this time they’re the first books in their series.
Grime and Punishment by Jill Churchill
After picking up two later books in this series earlier this year, I’m now going back and getting more and have acquired the first one. Book two, Farewell to Yarns was a BotW in May, but in Grime and Punishment Jane is trying to solve the murder of a cleaning lady in the house next door because the suspects include a lot of her friends. Often in a first in a series there is too much set up and the book can suffer, either from just having too much going on or from the mystery not being quite good enough. This isn’t one of those – it manages to introduce the group and Jane very naturally and the mystery is sufficiently twisty.
Murder on the Mountain by Ellie Alexander
After having enjoyed Alexander’s Secret Bookcase series, I was interested to read this first one in a different series from her – a re-release and retitle of something she had previously released under a different pseudonym. Our heroine is Meg, a journalist who scores a job at an outdoors magazine, where she’s definitely trying to fake it till she makes it because her outdoor skills are practically nil. The murder in this one is of a contestant in an outdoor competition TV show, but in the background is the death of Meg’s father (an investigative journalist) in mysterious circumstances while working on an expose. I didn’t love this – I found Meg a real trial because she is almost aggressively clueless about the outdoors, and about a few other things in the story. However as these are in Kindle Unlimited, I’ll probably give the second one a go to see if it improves any once all the series set up is over with. However, given this was Alexander’s first ever series, and I don’t know how much reworking of it she’s done, it may just be that Alexanders writing has changed since she wrote these!
Beaches, Bungalows and Burglaries by Tonya Kappes
Mae West’s (no, not that one) life has taken a turn – her much older husband has turned out to be a conman, he’s in jail, she’s divorced him and all his assets have been seized. So instead of a life of luxury, she’s got to start over and all she has is am RV and campground in Normal, Kentucky which her husband put in her name years ago. So she heads to Normal to start over, but finds that the community there is suffering because of her husband too. Then he turns up – not in prison, but dead in the lake at the campsite and suddenly she’s a suspect. I found this while I was looking for books for my missing states for the 50 states challenge this year, and didn’t realise that I’d read one of Kappes’ series years ago when she was being published by Henery press back when they were in a really good groove of easy, fun cozy crime. And this is slightly ridiculous (and the recipes at the end are awful) but it’s a pretty fun read, with a good set up for a series. If you’re a KU member, it’s worth a read, but I have no idea how Kappes has get this set up going for *checks* more than 40 books! I suspect that I’ll read a few more to see because long series are so hard to pull off!
As I said yesterday, most of my reading last week was to contribute to this year’s fifty states challenge and this was one of them. It’s slightly rule breaking but I’m going with it.
Buffalo West Wing is the fourth in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef mystery series featuring Olivia Paras, who (as the title suggests) is the executive chef at the White House. In this, a new president has just been elected and that means big changes for the staff at the Residence. It also means Olivia needs to impress the new President and his family, but when some mystery chicken wings turn up in her kitchen, she gets off on the wrong foot with them because refuses to serve them to the First Kids. But when the people who do eat them fall ill, she’s caught up in a plot to threaten the First Family.
This is the first in this series that I’ve read (or even come across) and it had slightly more peril than I was expecting and also a lot of pre existing relationships to get my head around. But there was info there (and not in info dumps) that it made sense and I really enjoyed it. I would happily read more of the series.
I read this one in paperback as you can seem but as it’s nearly 15 years old (and the series has been dormant since 2016) they may not be that easy to find in physical copies. In fact I’m amazed I found this one in Waterstones a couple of months ago. But they are all available on Kindle and Kobo.
I said last week that I have started my panic for the Fifty States Challenge early this year – and everything I finished this week except Gaudy Night is ticking off one of my missing states! If I can keep this rate up, I’ll be finished before Christmas, but my record on keeping this up is not great so I could still be in a panic on New Year’s Eve like every previous year!
Just a quick post today to say that the National Theatre’s new version of Ballet Shoes is back from tomorrow (17 November). I saw it back in February and loved it, and I’m so pleased they’ve decided to bring it back for Christmas. I’ve been recommending it to people as a family show that’s not a panto for the holidays. And of course if you haven’t read the original book, I re-read it after seeing the show and it’s still a joy.
Happy Saturday everyone, I’m back with some more new arrivals in the house. Some of them are already off the pile though, so that’s good and one of them will help me with the 50 States Challenge, which is becoming ever more critical so that’s good too!
So here we have three more Jill Churchill books because I went a little mad on Abebooks. But two of them are safely off the pile already so they don’t really count. Also not really counting is The Dead Side of the Mike which is a Charles Paris novel, which I have already read and already own in ebook format. But I couldn’t resist this when I saw it on a charity donation shelf at a cafe in Cumbria. The shelf had a lot of Simon Brett of various types and I think I did well to just stick to one – and I picked this one because of the BBC microphone and all the tape. So this is also going off to a proper shelf and not the pile. Also from that charity shelf is the Edith Skom, which is set on Hawaii and so even if it is truly terrible, it is useful to me! Then we have the second Rosemary Shrager after I enjoyed The Last Supper so much. The Anthony Horowitz is The Marble Hall Murders, the latest Magpie Murders, which is less giant now it’s out in paperback and also was on offer. Another offer was Jonathan Miles’s The Once Upon a Time World which is a history of the French Riviera, which as you know is a firmly in my Rich People Problems non-fiction area and I have been waiting for an offer on for ages. And finally there is the new Katherine Center in paperback which I had preordered even though it came out in kindle months ago.
And finally as a bonus, because I had left Days at the Torunka Café at my parents’ house last month and it wasn’t in the picture for Books Incoming, here it is with this month’s books:
Happy Friday everyone, this week I’m back with a Sarah Morgan series that feels like it has some great winter and festive books in it if you’re looking to snuggle up on the sofa out of the cold weather or even get in the mood for Christmas.
There are six books in this series (and also a couple of novellas) and the first of this series was actually the first Sarah Morgan I ever read nearly a decade ago now. The first three in the series centre on a group of friends who start an events company and who find love while being good at their jobs (competency porn!) and the second three expand to their wider circle. What really like about Sarah Morgan is that if people have problems in her books, they work them out for themselves – they are not solved by falling in love or by the person that they fall in love with.
The romance genre is constantly evolving and changing – historical romances are being replaced with romantasy and the trends in contemporary romance at the moment is much more towards younger heroines and first person narrative, but for me these fall really squarely into what I really enjoy the most in romance novels – a satisfying romance but with a couple who are more than just cipers falling in insta love for a reason you don’t quite understand as a reader. And I know that makes me old and unfashionable at the moment, and I’m ok with that!
These are easy to get hold of on Kindle and Kobo, but I don’t know how easy they’ll be in physical copies – I used to get my Sarah Morgans from The Works, but they only do recent releases, and of course it’s eight years since the last of these came out now so you may be more in the second hand/charity shop/library areas if you want a paperback. They’ve certainly had a cover refresh since I first read them!
Legends and Lattes is one of my favourite reads this year, and the third book in the series is out today. Brigands and Breadknives features Fern the Bookseller, who has moved to Thune to set up shop next door to a certain coffeeshop as an attempt to deal with her ennui with life. But it may not be as simple as a new place and a new start as various ne’er do wells emerge to cause problems. I’m looking forward to reading this one so much I may even buy it in paperback rather than waiting for the Kindle price to drop! If you haven’t read Legends and Lattes, it’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and I thoroughly recommend it.
It’s the second week of the month and it’s Wednesday so you know what that means: Kindle offers. And it’s quite a good crop this month, I spent more money than I should have (well I shouldn’t have been buying more books at all, so technically any money is more than I ought) when I was writing this!
I’m going to break with convention and start with books that I haven’t read because there are a lot of new releases on offer this month. Firstly, if you’re not finished with Halloween yet, Alexandria Bellefleur’s The Devil She Knows and Josie Silver’s Kooky Spooky Love are 99p. If you’re ready to move to Christmas reading, the new B K Borison High Spirits is 99p (as is the one from earlier this year, First Time Caller). This one has the literal Ghost of Christmas Past, so I’m not quite sure how we get to a happy ending with one portion of the couple being dead, but hey we all know I don’t have enough imagination for this. Martin Edward’s Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife is 99p – I hve this on my reading list for this Christmas. The Marble Hall Murders aka Magpie Murders 3 is 99p too because it’s out in paperback now, which is a total bargain considering how hefty it is and how much it cost when the hardback first came out – and you know I’ve been watching the price of this one!
In things I bought while writing the post there is Somewhere Beyond the Sea by T J Klune, the sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea and Smiley’s People by John Le Carré. And that’s your lot – because that really is a lot of books. I hope your wallet hasn’t suffered too much!
It has been a pretty wet and miserable start to November where I am, so a book from a favourite author that has a cheerful warm cover and makes you laugh is always a nice place to be and given that it’s on offer this month – for the first time as far as I have noticed it seems like a good time to be recommending it.
Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge is Helen Ellis’s latest collection of essays as the subtitle suggests its focus is her marriage and what a marriage can look like more than twenty years in – but it also takes you through the strange days of Covid and the effect that had on everyone. One of the effects on Helen was to become a houseplant person, and that is definitely a thing that happened to me during the pandemic and I felt very seen in the essay when she talks about smuggling more plants into the house and lying about the number of plants she has to her husband!
Ellis’s previous books American Housewife, Southern Lady Code and Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light have all been books of the week here, across nearly a decade, which means she’s been making me laugh for almost as long as I’ve been writing this blog and so in a way it’s not a surprise to me that I would be writing about this today. On the other hand, not every author that I liked in the early days of this blog has managed to keep up the quality or is still writing things that I like so that should be a testament in itself. I think that the fact that Ellis has another life going on alongside writing (she’s a high stakes poker player) helps provide her with fresh things to write about too, and she’s unafraid to mine her life (and her friends experiences too) or to go and get a new experience for things to write about. Equally, she clearly knows what to leave out – this feels like such a well rounded collection that there must have been more essays written that didn’t make the cut. It’s not a long book, but because it is essays (and because her books don’t come along that often) I rationed myself and managed to spread out my reading of it across more than a week and it was worth it. Now I just have to wait and hope for another collection soon.
I bought this on Kindle, where it’s on offer at £2.99 at the moment. It’s also on Kobo at £3.99 and as an audiobook read by Helen Ellis herself. I have some of her other collections in physical copy (maybe all of them, but I’m not by the shelves to check right now) and I’m not ruling out picking this one up to put on the shelves too, but I don’t remember seeing any of them in the shops. I will check next time I go into a Big Bookshop though.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 