Look! Through the rain you can see the real Wild Cat Island – aka Peel Island on Coniston Water! Despite the terrible weather I had a wonderful long weekend in the Lake District the other week and our theme was Children’s literature – so we did the steam yacht on Coniston so we could see Wild Cat and get a bit of water time in a slightly more relaxing way than sailing a dingy like the Blacketts and the Walkers. And given the weather – which included a thunderstorm as well as the torrential rain you can see in the picture – that was probably a good idea.
We also went to Grasmere to see Wordworth’s grave, and we also got rained on there. But given that I really don’t like Wordsworth (thank you A Level English Literature) i was slightly less forgiving of the rain there than I was in Ransome country.
Anyway to mark the trip, have a throwback post to my Swallows and Amazons series post from last summer after I went to book conference. And yes it was some of my book conference gang that I was hanging out with!
This Thursday I wanted to mention one of this week’s new releases – because the second (and final?!) book in K J Charles’s The Doomsday Books series* is out. A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel is another landowner and a smuggler romance – this time it’s a former soldier who has unexpectedly become an earl and the son of a notorious smuggling clan that operates in his newly inherited patch. Our smuggler is Luke, who we met in the first book, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, in circumstances that I can’t really go into without giving away a lot of plot, but which do mean that I suspect that if you’ve read that book you’ll have a more satisfying experience with this, beyond just potential glimpses of previous couples if you know what I mean! Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading it once I can get my grubby hands on it!
*is it a series if it’s only two books? A duology? What if you don’t know if there’ll be a third or not?
This week we have the latest in my occasionalseries of round-ups of books in the British Library Crime Classics series. I’ve readquite a lot of them now, so we’re a even further into the more recent releases – so even more forgotten section of their books, but there are still some good books to be found there
The Black Spectacles by John Dickson Carr
Poisoned chocolates are not exactly unknown in detective fiction, but this is a really good example. A young woman is suspected by her village of having planted poisoned chocolates in the village sweet shop. The local landowner stages a memory game to try to prove his own theory about how they could have been poisoned – and ends up dead himself. And it’s all on film. The crime is seemingly impossible, and yet someone has done it and Dr Gideon Fell is going to figure it out. It’s really good and really clever and keeps the level up all the way through. I’ve only read about half a dozen of John Dickson Carr’s mysteries, but this is one of my favourites of them – Til Death Do Us Part was a BotW and if you liked that, you’ll probably like this too.
Suddenly at His Residence by Christianna Brand
I’m working my way through the Christianna Brand books that are available from in the British Library Crime Classics series as they become available in Kindle Unlimited. I think Green for Danger is still my favourite, but I enjoyed this one more than Death of a Jezebel. This features a grandfather with a complicated family life who is found dead the morning after saying he would change his will. There are a lot of people who wanted him dead, and a crime that seems very hard to have committed. It’s set while World War Two is still going on (1944 to be precise) and although it was published in 1046 so it doesn’t quite have the same sense of not knowing what would happen that Green For Danger has, but it still has lots of wartime detail that adds to the mystery and setting. A very easy and interesting mystery.
The Mysterious Mr Badmanby W F Harvey
And finally one from the thriller-y the end of the British Library Crime Classic collection. The Mysterious Mr Badman features a a mystery that starts with the nephew of a blanket manufacturer agreeing to mind the bookshop below his lodgings for an afternoon and three men coming all looking for the same book by John Bunyan. From there, it turns into a murder mystery with political overtones, the morals of which you may or may not agree with, but that will still manage to sweep you along while you’re reading it. I nearly called it a caper, but that’s not is not really the right word when there is murder involved. but think 39 steps, but with a book and a murder at the heart of it. Not bad at all.
This week’s BotW is one of the books that I picked up on my buying spree while writing last week’s Kindle Offers and that I couldn’t help but read pretty much straightaway (within a week counts as straightaway for me) because it has a pretty cover and it was sitting there on my Kindle and Cat Sebastian is just so reliably good.
This is set in the world of newspapers in New York in the late 1950s. Nick is from the rough end of Brooklyn and has gone into journalism despite the disapproval of his family. Andy’s dad owns the paper and has sent him to work in the newsroom as part of the process of finding out how the business works. The two of them shouldn’t get on, and yet they do and soon they’re friends. Except that Nick really wishes it wasn’t just friends, but he knows that that’s all that’s possible. Isn’t it?
This is a very sweet slow burn love story. But its also low on angst and despite the 1950s setting you don’t need to worry too much about Bad Things Happening to characters because they’re gay. And you can argue about whether or not that is realistic or not, but I chose to believe that happy endings were possible and I think Cat Sebastian has done a really good job of figuring out a scenario where Nick and Alex can have one. I spent most of my time reading this with a big soppy smile on my face and really that’s what I needed. It’s sweet and romantic and it has a couple at the centre of it who get each other and want to make each others lives better in little ways and big ones. They’re both just happier when the other person is around them, preferably around them and happy. And there’s a really cute bit with a Cat. Perfect reading when you need a happy ending to make your day better.
I can see some people on Goodreads complaining about the fact that it’s written in the third person present, but honestly that bothered me so little that I didn’t even notice before I saw the reviews mentioning it. But to be honest, it’s very rare that the Point of View of a book bothers me – unless it’s second person, or the POV is inconsistent in some way. I can’t help that I’m not fussy like that!
As I mentioned at the top, I bought my copy on Kindle because it’s on offer at the moment for 99p, and the good news is it’s on offer on Kobo too. You’re welcome. I’m super pleased it’s on offer at the moment because it only came out in June and my experience with Cat Sebastian is that it’s unusual for her books to be at discount this quickly. So snap it up while you can and thank me later.
Something of an actual book reading spree I have to say. Partly because I got given a few Girls Own books at the weekend and they were sitting right in my eye line on the sofa and partly because the pile is getting wildly out of control. I should probably do a post about it but I’m not sure I can bring myself to contemplate it. Anyway, a real mixed bag of reading.
I’m back in podcast land for this week’s Not a Book – with Wondery’s series about Michael Jackson.
It’s nearly 15 years since Michael Jackson died – which felt really shocking to me, even though I know logically that it must be that long ago because of where I was living and what I was doing when the news happened. It would be understating it to say that Jackson’s legacy is complex, and for those of people who can remember parts of his career there probably some complicated feelings. But there’s also now a whole generation who don’t remember Jackson at all. And I think Wondery’s Think Twice does a really good job of setting out the whole story – the child stardom into solo supremacy and beyond but also the accusations of child sexual abuse.
Obviously the content of this is pretty grim at times so bear that in mind before you listen – it has a lot of graphic details from the court transcripts when you get to the abuse allegation episodes. The presenters are Jay Smooth, who presented a hip hop radio show in New York for nearly 30 years and is now a cultural commentator, and Leon Neyfakh, who did the Slowburn series on Watergate and the Clinton Impeachment and then went on to present Fiasco (all for Wondery). So it’s got a mix of music expertise but also investigative journalism that works really well. I think everyone of my age or older has an opinion on Michael Jackson, but I think this is a pretty even handed series – it doesn’t minimise his musical impact and legacy, but it also doesn’t minimise the allegations. I learned some stuff – despite having watched Leaving Neverland back when that came out and Janet Jackson’s documentary about her career – which also touches on what growing up in that family was like and having also read a bunch of stuff about Jackson over the years.
It’s a ten part series – if you’re not a Wondery plus member the final episode drops today (the 17th) on all the usual podcast platforms. If you do have wondery plus (which I do) you can get the ad-free versions – and you could have binged it already like I did!
Here we are, with another haul of books that I’ve somehow managed to acquire since the last post! So here we have the results of my trip to The Works – which are the Julie Cohen which looks like classic Rich People Problems stuff, To Swoon and to Spar which is the most recent Martha Waters’ Regency Vows series and A Terrible Village Poisoning, which is the third in a series that I think it trying to capitalise on the success of The Thursday Murder Club and that I want to try. I got the Tina Carter biography of Raine Spencer in Waterstones on the same day. Then there’s the Anne Granger, which I picked up after writing the post about Mitchell and Markby and being reminded that I hadn’t finished reading all the Campbell and Carter books and New Adult came from my trip to that humongous romance section in Waterstone’s Piccadilly. And the three remaining books were a bit on an impulse purchase online – I went looking for Barking, so that I could finish off the series and ended up with the other two as well. Oopsie daisy. But it happens. Now I just need to read some of them and get the pile down a bit!
The fourth in Richard Osman’s cosy crime series about a group of residents in a senior citizens complex came out yesterday. The blurb for The Last Devil to Die says that the gang start to investigate after an old friend in the antiques business is killed, which sounds intriguing and also a bit different from the last two. I haven’t read it yet – but I know I’m going to and probably pretty soon, so today I’m flagging my post about the series from just under a year ago, because I know that it is going to be everywhere in all the shops – probably on offer – and so will the previous ones. If you haven’t read any yet, they’re definitely a series that repays reading in order, and you should be able to get hold of the earlier books in the series pretty easily at this point – including in the second hand book stores and charity shops.
The paperback comes out in the UK this very day so I’m taking the opportunity to actually write about Lucy Parker’s latest which I read as soon as it came out in Kindle in August.
Pet is the personal assistant to the newest member of the Royal Family. Johnny is and Princess Rose are perfect together – but as a working royal he is far from perfect as wherever he goes, chaos follows and Pet often gets caught up in its wake. Matthias is Johnny’s long suffering principle personal protection officer. He’s a former soldier and brilliant at his job – but Johnny is a challenge even for his skills. When a dodgy photo starts the tabloids speculating that Pet and Johnny are in a relationship, the royal PR team decide the way to scotch the rumours is for Pet and Matthias to stage a fake relationship. He’s grumpy, she’s sunshine, it’s never going to be more than a ruse… or is it?
Oh you know it totally is going to turn into something else. And I should also say that yes, this the second book in a series that started with Battle Royal, but you really don’t need to have read that to enjoy this. Yes, you do get to see Sylvie and Dominic again in this, but all the back story you need is set out in this. But of course if you have read it already it works that much better.
And it does work really well. You know I love a fake romance novel and grumpy sunshine romance novels are rapidly rising up my list of favourite tropes – when they’re done right. And this is done so right I forgive it for the bit where it’s a teeny tiny heroine and a Great Big Giant hero. But only because it’s loosely a Beauty and the Beast retelling (or at least I think it is!) so of course that’s what you have to do.
The paperback is out today – and I’m expecting it will be in the stores – and not just the giant romance section at Waterstones Piccadilly because I can see it on click and collect for a tonne of other branches of Waterstones! And of course the Kindle and Kobo are already out there.
It’s that time again – second Wednesday of the month means it’s Kindle Offers o’clock. Hide your wallets, disable your one click, this could get pricey!
And lets start with a recent BotWThe Boyfriend Candidateand something I recommended really quite recently – Katherine Center’s The Bodyguard which are both 99p (and Boyfriend Candidate is in Kindle Unlimited too). A BotW from slightly longer ago is The Roughest Draft which is the same price. And I’ve written a lot about Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy this summer, but her first novel Prep is on offer this month.
The movie version of Red, White and Royal Blue came out a few weeks ago on Amazon Prime – and the book is 99p at the moment, presumably as a tie in. And Ashley Herring Blake’s Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail is 99p at the moment, just over a month out from the release of the third book in that series.
I’m a bit New Adult-ed out at the moment, but I know that Elle Kennedy is very popular – so thought I’d mention that The Summer Girl is 99p. I read Chloe Liese‘s If Only You from her Bergman Brothers series earlier this year -and that is 99p at the moment but one of her Shakespeare retellings, Two Wrongs Make a Right, is also on offer so I may give that a go despite the aforementioned New Adult fatigue.
One of my favourite recent historical romances, Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting by Sophie Irwin is 99p – I assume to coincide with the release of the sequel. Eloisa James’s latest romance, Not That Duke, is 99p – I’ll admit that that’s one of the ones that I bought while writing this, as is Alexis Halls‘ Mortal Follies! Sarah MacLean’s latest is out – but the first in this series Bombshell is £2.99 on Kindle which is the cheapest I’ve seen it. And Cat Sebastian‘s latest We Could Be So Good is also 99p. It only came out in June and yes, I bought that too.
In plain historical (as opposed to Historical romance) the final Philippa Gregory Tudor book The Last Tudor is 99p. I mentioned it in the Waterstone’s post on Saturday, but Whalebone Theatre is also 99p on Kindle at the moment as well as getting a big push in stores. Gill Hornby‘s Miss Austen is also 99p
In classic novels, Daphne Du Maurier‘s Rebecca is 99p, as is P G Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters and the very first Albert CampionMurder at Black Dudley . In other classic crime, Unnatural Death is the Peter Wimsey at 99p this month in an edition I know are decent as opposed to the ever increasing number of alternative editions – some of them even cheaper but with descriptions and covers that give me reason to not entirely sure they’re to be trusted. This is also happening to the Agatha Christies now too – which is very frustrating. The 99p Georgette Heyer is The Nonesuch and there are a couple more at £1.99 including These Old Shades. And this month’s bargain Terry Pratchetts are Dragons at Crumbling Castle for 99p (this is one of his children’s short story collections) and in the Discworld it is Sourcery at £1.99.
And finally a quick bit of non-fiction – GregJenner‘s Ask a Historian and Dead Famous are on offer too. And Antonia Fraser’s Charles II biography is 99p as well – if you want 900 pages on the last King Charles before the current one.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 