Tag: Book of the Week

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Halloween 2026

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It’s Halloween on Saturday so for this week’s Recommendsday I’ve got some spooky season reading for you. As ever, I had a whole list of books I was planning to read for this, and managed to only read a few of them, but a few is better than none right?

A Murder at Midnight by Ellie Alexander*

Halloween is coming in Redwood Grove and along with the rest of the town Annie and Fletcher are preparing for spooky happenings. When they get a phone call from a TV company looking to film an episode of their ghost hunting show in the bookshop it seems like great publicity – they get the Haunted Bookshop on TV on a show with a big fan base. But when a member of the crew dies, it seems like the only publicity they’ll be getting is bad, unless they can figure out who did it. This is the fourth in the Novel Detectives series but can absolutely be read standalone because there’s very little of any of the ongoing story lines in this, it’s mostly the mystery of the week. And it’s a fun set up – if you remember the Most Haunted TV show of the early 2000s this TV show will feel familiar to you and the crew working on it have plenty of tensions and rivalries to provide a motive for murderer. My favourite in this series in a while – more of this please and less of the running background stories!

Ghost Business by Jen DeLuca

This was Jen DeLuca’s new book for 2025 – the second in the Boneyard Key series. This features Sophie the ghost tour guide from Haunted Ever After and Tristan a newcomer who runs a ghost tour business and is there to open a new franchise. He’s surprised to find there’s already a ghost tour and she’s horrified that his ghost stories are made up. Then they go viral when their two tours run into each other, but both of them are actually fighting their attraction to each other. This is actually pretty gentle for a book that features an actual hurricane, and I enjoyed it although there was a bit of a case of just have a proper conversation going on at a few points in the plot, and Tristan needs to just grow a bit of a backbone! I don’t think this is the pairing that people were expecting for Sophie from book one but it did work, so I look forward to seeing what DeLuca comes up with for the next book in the series.

Scared Off by Barbara Ross

This is a novella length story that fits into the Maine Clambake series between Shucked Apart and Muddled through and sees Julia trying to solve a murder when a Halloween party her niece is at is gatecrashed by local high schoolers. If you’re following the series and haven’t read as far as Shucked Apart yet, this will give away a big plot development, so bear that in mind, but if you are (relatively) up to date, this is a nice addition to the series. The mystery is complicated enough that you don’t find the solution too fast, but not so complicated that the story feels rushed, and that’s not something that you can say about all novellas. Worth a look if you only want something short.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die

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It’s Tuesday and whilst this isn’t a book with ghosts and ghouls, it does have dragons and elves, which I think makes it Halloween-y enough to be on theme for this week. And it was definitely the book that I have the most to say about of the ones that I read last week!

Sir Cameron is *technically* a knight, but he’s spent his whole career turning up just after the battle has happened and avoiding any chance that he might get killed, after all he’s just too handsome to die right? The battle against the mad sorcerer Merulo has been going on for years but a new prophecy has just been handed down by the church and it’s bad news for Sir Cameron: the only way to defeat Merulo is for Cameron to die. He’s (understandably) not keen on that idea, so runs away to throw himself on the mercy of the only person who doesn’t want him dead: Merulo. Merulo is less than pleased with this development: Cameron is vain, spoilt and attention seeking, but turning him into a vulture is entertaining. This is just the start of a voyage of discovery for Cameron but will he make it through alive? And will Merulo – because Cameron is getting strangely invested in the sorcerer’s survival…

I cannot adequately describe how bonkers this book is. Cameron getting turned into a vulture is only a small portion of the madness. It is totally, totally ridiculous and isn’t taking itself too seriously. It opens really strongly, and although I don’t think it quite carries through that promise, it’s still a fun read. It’s got a concussed elf as a (vengeful) side character and it keeps adding new twists and turns. And I think that’s where the problem is: it’s trying to do too much – the Amazon blurb includes the phrase “genre-bending” which doesn’t even begin to cover it really and it means it doesn’t quite do everything (anything?) as satisfyingly as you would like. I wasn’t sure how it was going to manage to resolve everything satisfactorily and I definitely didn’t expect how it did end, but it was a page turning way to pass some time on a wet and windy weekend.

I bought this one at Mr B’s Emporium so it is in some shops at least (and hasn’t spent too long on the pile in the grand scheme of things) but it’s also on Kindle and Kobo although I would wait for a price drop given the issues that I mention above – and the fact that is has really quite mixed reviews on Goodreads which suggest that other people had a bit less tolerance for it than I did! It has got a great cover though.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Seventh Sinner

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Here we are with another book on the week – and it’s yet another mystery novel!

This time it’s the first book in an Elizabeth Peter series that I haven’t previously read – The Seventh Sinner is the first to feature librarian Jacqueline Kirby. Written in the 1970s, this is set in Rome and our main character is Jean, a student in the city on a fellowship and along with her friends waiting to see if their work has been enough to secure a further year’s funding. She’s been having a great time in Italy – right up until the point where she finds one of the members of her group bleeding to death in a catacomb. And then the accidents start – or is someone actually trying to kill Jean. With the help of Jacqueline, can she stay alive to finish her studies?

This is quite of its time, but it’s an atmospheric mystery in a great setting with a some of the humour that you might expect if you’ve read the Vicky Bliss which started at a similar time or her historical Amelia Peabody books. If you’ve read or are used to reading books from the seventies it’ll probably work for you. I really enjoyed it and as you know from Books Incoming I’ve got the next two to read in the series already

Happy Reading!

new releases, Book of the Week, historical, Book previews, mystery, previews

Book of the Week: The Shadows of Kensington Gore

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This is a slight cheat again this week but for a different reason than the last two weeks have been. I did read this last week – but it’s not out until next Thursday so that’s where the rule breaking occurs. But as I always say, I make the rules so I’m allowed to do what I want about them in the end. It was my favourite thing I read last week though so it totally deserves this spot.

I really enjoyed The Murder at Worlds End and so I was looking forward to this follow up – and I was not disappointed. Stephen and Miss Decima are now in London, installed in a mansion block near the Royal Albert Hall. Miss Decima is and running a detective agency from it. But all the cases she is getting are household pilfering and she’s is getting bored. Stephen is finding is feet in a new neighbourhood and is growing frustrated that he’s not as involved in the detecting as he was hoping – and that he’s running the whole household on his own and having books thrown at him when he’s not doing things as quickly as Decima wants him to. But all this changes when they go to a Suffragette meeting ahead of the Coronation and Stephen is first on the scene of a murder. This also means he’s the police’s prime suspect – and so he and Miss Decima are back on the case again.

The atmosphere of pre-Coronation London is great – and so is the portrayal of the various factions within the movement for women’s suffrage. Too often this can get flattened to just the suffragettes, but this has got the peaceful and the militant factions in the thick of it – as well as all the various movements trying to prevent women from getting the vote. It’s also got the working class – or more accurate the servants class view, all of which makes for an intriguing mystery to solve. It’s also funny – Stephen’s antics as he tries to find his place in the neighbourhood are great, as is Decima and her various foibles. The body count is fairly high – but it manages to balance the light and the shade really well. Miss Decima hasn’t changed her character since the first book and so she’s as cantankerous and difficult as ever – and the book is trying hard not to soften her into fluffy old lady, which must be a temptation given the rest of the genre.

I raced through this and I really hope that there is a third book coming because this showed that there is plenty of material for mining in London for these two.

My copy came from NetGalley and as I said it’s out on the 22nd so you can pre-order it now if you’re desperate to read it after this rave review. Here are the Kindle and Kobo links. It’a a hardback release but should be fairly easy to find in the stores when it does come out – Waterstones have a signed version for preorder which is usually a good sign for availability and I’ve seen Murder at Worlds End all over the place since it came out last year. There’s an audiobook too – which looks like it might be dual narration between Joe Jameson and Juliet Stevenson which would be fun.

Happy Reading!

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!