Tag: Book of the Week

Book of the Week, mystery

Book of the Week: The Final Problem

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Yes, yes, yes, I know. I’m doing a book I finished on Monday again. But I have reasons: I’m carrying on two themes – it’s Sherlock Holmes related following on from the new Lady Sherlock coming out last week and it’s also translated – this time from Spanish. So there’s method to my madness.

It’s 1960 and in Greece bad weather has stranded tourists on the island of Utakos where they are staying in the only hotel. Then one of them is found dead in a beach cabana. It looks like suicide but one of the guests Basil Ormond – an out of work actor who is best known for playing Sherlock Holmes in a series of movies – thinks that it may be murder. The police can’t get to the island because of the weather and the other guests depute him to investigate because of his experience playing the detective on the big screen. Can he find the killer before the police arrive – or before the killer strikes again?

This is billed as inspired by Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes and I think that’s pretty accurate. It’s got a clever mystery, an interesting group of characters and it’s got a really nice style about it – I don’t know how much of that is the translator Frances Riddle vs Arturo Pérez-Reverte himself but it makes for a good reading experience. I didn’t have the killer worked out – which is also good – and once it was revealed I thought it was really neatly done.

Pérez-Reverte is a long established author in Spanish – I’ve seen him on the book shelves when I’ve been browsing on holidays in Spain – and upon looking on amazon it looks like an other series of his about a Spanish D’Artagnan type may also be available in English but I’ve certainly never seen them in shops the way I have this one over the last few months. If you like a classic crime novel this is worth a look, and I enjoyed it enough that I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more of his books – and if this does well may be we will get some more of them in English.

It’s on offer for 99p on Kindle and Kobo at the moment, and as I said it should be fairly easy to find in the shops too.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, mystery, new releases

Book of the Week: A Game of Cat and Killer

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Happy Tuesday everyone. After last week’s Japanese fiction Recommendsday it just so happens that I’ve got another Japanese novel in translation today – it’s actually a new release in English and it’s got a very different feel from the ones I mentioned last week…

Yoshitaro Katayama is not an ideal candidate to be a detective: he doesn’t like heights, he’s socially awkward and he’d rather not come into contact with dead bodies. But his father was detective and it was his dying wish for his son. And so here he is. One morning he’s offer the choice of looking at some gruesome crime scene photos of a murdered young woman or going to the college she was a student at to conduct investigations. He chooses the latter, but soon there are more bodies and he has acquired a cat which belonged to one of the victims. He’s not keen on having a pet, until she starts to show an unusual level of interest in the case…

Now I know there are a lot of cozy mysteries with cats (often talking cats) in them. This is not one of those. Katayama also has a sister that he lives with and worries a lot about, and an auntie who is trying to arrange him a marriage but this is not cozy. Do not be deceived. This is a serial killer mystery which happens to have a cat. The detective is a bit hapless but the crimes he is investigating are anything but.

This originally came out in the late 1970s and is the first in a long running series by Jiro Akagawa that has only just making it into English. Considering their age they felt surprisingly current – obviously there are no mobile phones or computers but apart from that they could have been now. Of course that could be down to the choices Haydn Trowell has made in the translation. The murders were a bit on the gruesome side for what I’m used to reading, but I am interested enough in what happens to detective Katayama next that I may pick up the next one when it comes out in a few months time.

My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out today in Kindle and Kobo and all the usual formats. I have no sense of how easy (or otherwise) this will be to get in hard copy, but it’s got physical copies listed so it may be possible

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: To Brew or Not to Brew

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It’s Tuesday again, and as I said yesterday a the weather is turning autumnal, so my reading is turning towards mysteries. And at the weekend I started in on a couple of the cozy crime paperbacks that I had on the shelf – and one of them is my pick today.

The heroine of To Brew or Not to Brew is Max (short for Maxine) who is in the process of setting up her own craft brew pub in Pittsburgh. She’s trained as a brewmaster in Germany and has bought a building that used to be part of a (larger and now closed) brewery to open her business in. But it seems like someone doesn’t want her to open – what starts as acts of sabotage turn fatal as her assistant is found dead in the brewery. The police (in the form of her homicide detective dad) think that it’s accidental, but Max isn’t convinced and sets out to investigate herself. Along the way she reconnects with a school crush and adopts a kitten, but will her business (and Max herself!) survive until the grand opening?

There are so many cozy crime novels that are small food-and-or-drink businesses, but this felt like a nice change. There’s a bit of suspension of disbelief required when it comes to Max’s dad being in anyway involved in the police case, but that’s a fairly common thing in cozy crime to be honest – see also businesses managing to remain open and solvent despite bodies turning up all over the place. I also thought that the setting felt very distinctive – I haven’t been to Pittsburgh but it felt like it was grounded in the reality of an actual real place rather than something that would have been the same if it had been set in any other city.

I did have the murderer figured out fairly early, but given that this was doing loads of set up for a series I can forgive it that. This came out in 2015 and there are two more, which I would definitely read if I can lay my hands on them but they’re not available on Kindle in the UK and I think I got lucky finding this one in Waterstones Piccadilly (lets not contemplate how long ago it was that this popped up in Books Incoming or I’ll get really depressed at my rate of progress on the pile). But I guess there’s always a chance that next time I go in there they’ll have the others I guess? Joyce Tremel has a couple of other series too which I’ll keep an eye for but I suspect they’re going to be as hard to find as the sequels to this are.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

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I’m actually following up on a new release I mentioned a couple of weeks back for this week’s pick, because it really lived up to the promise of the blurb and the gorgeous cover and was a really great read.

At the start of the book Philippa is cycling to work as a university professor when she narrowly misses falling into a sinkhole as it opens up. This near miss gives her a wake up call and suddenly she doesn’t want to put up with the frustrations of her academic job any more – whether it’s the office that’s actually a cupboard or the (male) colleagues who seem to only value her for the fact they can force her to do the jobs they don’t want to. So she hands in her notice and throws her life in to chaos. Luckily she inherited her romance-author grandmother’s house (and boat) and so she moves back there to regroup. Unluckily the house is in need of some serious repair and also comes with a sitting tenant – her grandmother’s former co-writer (and cover model). As Philippa and Dylan start to navigate their awkward co-habitation situation they also get to know each other and eventually find outlines for six more novels in Philippa’s grandmothers fantasy pirate romance series, which they start to write together. But can Philippa actually find a new future outside of academia?

This has a really good slow burn romance with two characters who have a lot of issues to work through, but because Philippa has the backstop of selling the house (which is on prime ocean front land) the stakes are lower than you might expect. She does have the most awful parents that I have recently encountered in literature and I really, really wanted them to get a lot of comeuppance (more than they did get, I’m warning you). But Philippa and Dylan’s slow dance towards each other is worth putting up with the rage that her mother will generate in you (her siblings are better than her parents, mostly, but that’s not saying much). Philippa’s disillusionment with academia felt very real – as did her difficulty in letting go of her plan for her life and figuring out a new one. I think that’s very relatable for millennials especially, who graduated into the financial crisis of 2008 and feel like they’ve been trying to make their lives more secure ever since then.

And as a romance reader, I loved that Philippa’s grandmother was a romance author of the old school type and that romance novels were the answer to Philippa figuring herself out and finding love. This is a warm hug of a novel – well except for the leaking roof, and bracing sea breezes – and would make a great autumnal read as you curl up on a sofa and hide from the changing seasons. I haven’t read any of Jacqueline Firkins’ other books but I’m pretty sure I have at least one of them on the TBR so you may see that popping up on the weekly list soon too!

My copy came from NetGalley but it was an Amazon First Reads pick in August before it came out at the start of September and is now in Kindle Unlimited so if you’re in that you can get it. That does mean it’s not on Kobo at the moment, and I also don’t have much of a sense of how easy it might be to find in the shops but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Author’s Guide to Murder

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For the second week running I’m picking a book I finished on Monday. I did this to myself last week by picking Vagabond and now I’m creating another potential problem for Future Verity. Fingers crossed the train journeys this week help me with a bigger reading list to chose from and break the cycle…

On a remote island off the Scottish coast, Castle Kinloch is a gothic mansion that’s been turned into a writers retreat in the hands of a literary superstar. Except Brett Saffron Paisley has just been found dead in the folly in the grounds and three American writers who were staying at the castle are among the prime suspects in the case. Kat de Noir writes erotica, Cassie Prigle writes cozy mysteries and Emma Endicott writes historical fiction – but the three of them say they’re working on a novel together, but the detective in charge of the case is suspicious.

This says “A Novel” on the front, but actually this is Williams, White and Willig doing a murder mystery that’s also a satire about the literary world. Now I will say that this is a big shift from what the three of them usually write – which is timeslip historical fiction like The Lost Summers of Newport – and I’m not sure they did a good enough job of setting that up for the regular reader. The characters are very caricaturist and I found it pretty hard going for the first half or so, then it improved as I realised that they were going for maximum ridiculous. Or at least I hope that’s what they were going for. By the end I was won over by the absolutely bonkers finale to the mystery strand and the fact that everyone got a happily ever after.

Basically I liked it when it was over more than I had during the reading process which makes this a bit of a strange one, but hey this has got very, very mixed reviews on Goodreads, so I thought it was worth writing about because I think that says something about the expectations management on this one for regular Williams, Willig and White readers and the blurb saying it’s Agatha Christie meets Murder, She Wrote which really doesn’t describe what’s going on here either. I did love the nods to their other characters and real life authors in this but I definitely prefer their historical fiction – and I suspect if we get another book from the trio (and their usual publication schedule was every other year which should have made this year a year but I don’t see one on the schedule) then they’ll go back to that.

This one is an import from the US if you want it in an actual copy so you’re probably going to have to order it rather than stumble across it in a shop, but it is on Kindle and Kobo – although I think £6.99 is probably a bit much for how much I liked it!

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, memoirs, reviews

Book of the Week: Vagabond

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As I said yesterday, it was a bit of a grim week on a lot of fronts, one of which was the celebrity death front. And although I finished this on Monday so it’s technically cheating, it feels somehow right to make Tim Curry’s memoir this week’s pick.

In case you missed the last fifty years of pop culture, Tim Curry was an actor who first rose to prominence as Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Show in a role he reprised in the movie version The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He went on to play an eclectic range of characters across his career – and if you’re a millennial he will likely have been a key figure in one of the movies or TV shows that defined your childhood – whether it is Muppet Treasure Island, Home Alone 2, Annie, The Wild Thornberries, The Worst Witch or Clue. And there are more I could have picked – he was that prolific. He had a stroke in 2012 but continued to do some voice work and occasional appearances after that.

Vagabond came out last autumn and was much awaited as Curry didn’t give a lot of interviews (although he was always great value when he did) and rarely revealed anything about his personal life. And if you’re looking for juicy scoops on that front, this is not that. He warns you right at the start he’s not talking about his love life and he sticks to that. What this is is a gallop through the rest of his life with a look at his early years it feels mostly because he thinks it helps you understand his attitude to life: his father was a navy chaplain whose job meant they moved around a lot and then died young (in his late 40s from a stroke), quite a distant relationship with his mother who didn’t understand him and a boarding school education all of which added up to a very self contained and independent adult. He does a really good job of making you feel like he’s revealing a lot about himself while actually keeping a lot back – basically a memoir on his own terms, which he sets out very clearly at the start.

I am one of those who first saw him in one of those 80s and 90s roles and then graduated to Rocky Horror as a teen and then missed out on seeing him as King Arthur in Spamalot because I was a penniless student at the wrong end of the country at the time. So I learned a lot about his career from reading the book but what I enjoyed the most about it was how much it felt like it was really in his voice. And I know I said that he didn’t give a lot of interviews, but the ones he did were memorable and of course he’s done so much voice work over the years that it is easy to imagine him saying the words as you read it – and he did read the audiobook and I can’t tell you the willpower it took not to also buy the audiobook when I had the hardback on the pile.

I’m glad that he got to tell his story on his terms – even if he wasn’t entirely sure about the whole concept as he said several times through the book. I’m annoyed at myself for the fact that it took him dying for me to bump the book to the top of the to-read pile but strangely it did feel like a good time to read it and having read all the obituaries and watched all the clips this week it was nice to read about his life in his own words – and spot where quotes had been lifted for the obits or stories that he had told in interviews popped up or were lightly referenced. But I enjoyed reading it and it’s out in paperback now and if I was running a bookshop I’d be putting it in an obvious place for people to happen across right now.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Fantasy, romance

Book of the Week: Swordheart

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This was a really easy pick today. Yes I read books last week that are out this week, but actually this was my favourite thing I read AND it has a sequel out today, which I’m going to have to sit on my hands not to buy straightaway because I loved this so much. And you can hear about one of this week’s new releases tomorrow, because I wrote a Recommendsday for three of the new August books that I’ve read and you can thank me for that later.

Halla has been housekeeper to her great uncle since her husband died. But now Uncle Silas is dead, she’s inherited his property and her cousin and his mother have locked her in her room until she’ll agree to marry him. She’d rather die than marry clammy handed Alver, so after a few days imprisonment and increasingly desparate she takes the sword that’s mounted on the wall in its scabbard to see if she might be able to use it to commit suicide. But when she unsheathes it, a man appears. Sarkis is an immortal warrior trapped inside the enchanted sword. He is usually fighting battles or carrying out assassinations but now he’s bound to protect Halla. What follows is a journey back and forth across the land to try and secure Halla’s safety and her inheritance and an experience quite unlike anything Sarkis has had in the centuries since he was trapped in the sword.

I really, really enjoyed this. It’s got great characters, a good central problem to solve and brilliant world building that is never info-dumped on you. This is set in the same world as some of Kingfishers other series but I haven’t read any of them (yet!) and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. I’m on a big run of cozy fantasy at the moment and this was exactly what I was hoping it might be. I’ve written before about my patchy record with fantasy and also with knowing what I’m going to like in the genre, but this hit smack into my reading wheelhouse and was just what I needed after a distinctly mixed week in some of my other reading. It was a brilliant palate cleanser after a book that I really, really disliked and I would happily have followed Halla and Sarkis around for another hundred pages – and it’s already a 400 page book.

I picked this up in The Spicy Librarian after seeing it in various shops for ages – including reading the first few pages in Foyles a year or so back and enjoying it but not being able to justify buying it at the time – and seeing various people in my bookish communities raving about them for a while. On the one hand, I regret not reading this sooner, on the other, as I said at the top I now don’t have to wait to read the next in the series- and for people who read this when it first came out it’s been an eight year wait! The new one is called Daggerbound, and it’s about The Dervish, one of Sarkis’s comrades – and there’s a third one coming next year about Angharad. I’m already very excited.

Swordheart should be super easy to get hold of – I’ve seen it in almost every bookshop with a fantasy or romantasy section for the last year or so – and it’s in Kindle and Kobo. I had been waiting for it to go on offer since I read the start in Foyles, but I hadn’t spotted it happening yet, so maybe the new one will be the moment for an offer?

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Honey Bee Mine

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It’s Tuesday again and I’m back again with another romance book pick – but this time it’s a bit of a weepy one, in a good way though, not in a not-really-a-romance-because-someone-dies way. I previewed Sarah T Dubb’s second book in the lookahead at the start of the year and so it’s probably not a surprise that this would be my pick once I read it.

Penny Becker is a bee keeper, and she’s also trying to keep her family’s farm going. She grew up on the farm with her mother and grandmother – after her grandfather and her father upped and left their relative partners. Penny never stops working – and she never relies on anyone other than herself because it always ends in tears. The last time she did try to let someone in, it resulted in a failed expansion plan, the loan for which is the reason the farm might be about to be foreclosed on. She really needs the annual honey festival to be a success to save the farm. Zander Bouras spent his childhood summers on his grandfather’s farm next door and he really, really hated it. He is not at all happy to be back in town for the summer, but his ex-wife wants to spend summer in town with her parents and where his son goes, Zander goes. And so he’s back in town and he’s taking the summer off from his life as a restauranteur to deal with the property his grandfather left him. As a teen he hated Penny for her perfect life, but his son is really into bees and so he and Penny are forced into each other’s orbit and need to learn to work together.

I was expecting the enemies bit of the enemies to lovers trope to last a bit longer than it did, but actually Zander and Penny get past their issues relatively quickly and this is more of a small town romance where one half of the couple really, really isn’t planning on staying in town and where the other is keeping some pretty big secrets. And I’ll admit I did want Penny to use her words and explain what was going on to someone, anyone other than just her co-worker, but he was encouraging her to let people in and Penny’s reluctance to ask for help felt very logical given the circumstances of her life. And this isn’t always doing what you expect it to do, and there’s one particular thing I was half expecting to occur that didn’t and in the end, I didn’t really mind because I was too invested in how Zander and Penny were going to find their way to a happy ending.

Sarah T Dubb says at the start of the book that this wasn’t the second book that she was planning to release after Birding With Benefits and this did make me a bit teary eyed at times – in a good way, not a miserable one which I don’t remember from Birding, but honestly, like her prior novel this has relatable characters who are imperfect and dealing with it – even if it’s a completely new group of people in a completely different state to Birding – and maybe one day we will see the original second book too. Either way, I’ll be looking for the next book from Dubb whenever it appears.

This one is available in Kindle and Kobo. I pre-ordered the paperback but when it turned up (back in March!) it was definitely an American edition and I don’t think I’ve seen this in a store yet so I don’t know how easy it will be to get a proper copy. If I spot it I’ll try and mention it though.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy

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Happy Tuesday everyone, this week’s choice was one of the easiest that I have recently made. I started this one on Sunday night and finished it on Tuesday and I would have finished it sooner if I hadn’t had to work. Anyway, to the book.

Osric is a member of an order of assassins, Aurienne is a healer and a member of an enemy order. But Osric needs an expert healer – he’s injured and his order doesn’t let members retire. Luckily Aurienne desperately needs funding to help find a cure for a disease that’s ravaging children. And that is how the two of them find themselves flung together. As Aurienne (reluctantly) tries to heal Osric, the two of them discover that there may be some thing bigger behind the reoccurrence of the Pox. The trouble is that the longer the two of them spend in each other’s company, the harder it is to ignore the attraction between them – no matter how much they want to ignore it.

This was just a total delight. Really, it absolutely was. It’s got witty banter, two main characters who really don’t want to like each other but who really need each other and the forced proximity is truly epic. If I have a gripe with it, it’s that you don’t get all the answers in this book – but that’s also good news because it means there is a sequel, which came out in July. I wish I’d read this sooner – because the sequel was on NetGalley if only I’d known and now I’m going to have to pay money (and quite a lot of money) for it if I want to know what happens next any time soon.

I have a very mixed record on fantasy, but this is exactly the sort of end of fantasy that I like. It’s not cozy but it’s not to terribly high concept for me to deal with. Snarky banter is one of my favourite things in books and this has some of the best banter I’ve recently encountered as well as a brilliant inner monologue from the two leads to keep you going when they’re not actively fighting with each other. And the slow burn and forced proximity is excellent. it’s just so good. So, so good.

This one is super easy to get hold of – I’ve seen it in bookshops all over the place in the last year and just never got around to picking it up (more fool me) and of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too. Place your bets now on how long I manage to resist the sequel!

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: A Wedding Planner’s Guide to Stealing the Bride

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Happy Tuesday and my pick today is back to romance and it is one of the new releases that I read last week and there’s another coming up tomorrow in the quick reviews too.

Kalpana is planning the wedding of her dreams, or at least the wedding of her fiancé’s dreams. Marcus is a literary fiction superstar and Kalpana is a romance writer. He’s from old money and she’s the third generation of her family born in the UK but they’re in Sri Lanka with their wedding planner Sampath to plan the big traditional Sri Lankan wedding that Marcus wants – even though Kalpana isn’t sure those traditions feel right for her. Sampath is a great listener – and seems to hear what Kapana wants in a way that Marcus seems not to be.

I read it across less than twenty four hours over the weekend and it was a real treat. As you can tell from the title this is a love triangle type situation, but I don’t think this is going to ping anyone’s cheating monitor for reasons that I can’t really explain without it being a spoiler. As well as the romance, Charika is exploring feelings of identity and culture and also looking at the place of romance and commercial fiction in the bookish infrastructure all of which is right up my street. It also really made me want to visit Sri Lanka – it paints such a vivid picture of the future places they visit and the potential wedding venues.

My copy came from NetGalley but this came out last week and I’m not sure how easy the paperback will be to find but it’s on Kindle and Kobo for £1.99 at the moment as are some of Charika’s previous novels some of which I’ve written about here like Picture Perfect and Knowing Me, Knowing You.

Happy Reading!