Tag: Book of the Week

Book of the Week, cozy crime

Book of the Week: A Dark and Stormy Murder

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This week I’m back in the cozy crime genre for my pick, and with a first in a series so I’m abiding by the rules (yes, those rules I set myself!).

And so the plot: Lena’s just landed a job as the assistant to her favourite writer, Camilla Graham and moved to a small town in Indiana. Lena has always wanted to be a writer and now she gets to learn from her idol. Lena’s best friend already lives in Blue Lake – in fact she’s the one who met Camilla first, but Lena quickly gets stuck into small town life and meeting the locals – including a notorious recluse and the chief detective. But when a body turns up on her boss’s land, and strange things start happening at the house Lena can’t help but start investigating…

This has a fairly classic cozy crime set up in many ways – small town, two potential love interests for the heroine and a developing group of friends. But the writing as a profession is fun and the actual murder plot is good and allows the development of Lena and Camilla’s working relationship as well as doing some world building work too. There’s also a secondary investigation going on that is setting up more for the series, so it feels quite action packed – and I mean that in a good way. At the moment Lena seems to be picking my least favourite of the two love interests but there’s plenty of scope for either him to grow on me or for her to change her mind. This is my first book by Julia Buckley, and there another five in this series and she has a couple of other series too so that’s something to look forward to, if I can just get the tbr under control…

I read this one in paperback, but it’s also available on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Haunted Ever After

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Oh I’m super predictable aren’t I? I finished this last week, it’s fast coming up for Halloween so of course it’s my pick today. I’m sorry. Well I’m not but i have to say I am.

As I said in my release day post, our heroine is Cassie, who moves to out of the city to Boneyard Key, which has the reputation as being the most haunted place in Florida. Her new house has just been renovated by a flipper but she soon discovers that it’s some what legendary on the local ghost tour and starts to investigate whether it is in fact haunted with the help of local cafe owner Nick. Nick’s lived in Boneyard Key all his life and he’s very wary of people who move in ti the area because they don’t stick around. So he’s got a tourists only rule for his relationships – or really situationships, but is Cassie the one who is different?

This is lots of fun. I’m not always great with books with the supernatural or paranormal but this hits just the right side of everything for me. It’s fun, it’s flirty and it knows what the rules of the world are. If you like Jen DeLuca’s Ren Faire series, this has the same sort of humour and sensibility but it’s in Florida and it’s got some ghosts. I really enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing what the next hook in the series is.

You can get it in kindle and kobo now, and theoretically paperback, but I haven’t spotted it in a shop yet – and I have been looking

Happy Reading.

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Autumn Chills

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This weeks BotW is one of my purchases while I was writing the Kindle Offers post after I got the sample which didn’t get to the end of the first short story (a Poirot one) and I needed to know who did it! So here we are, an Autumn book read in Autumn – check me.

This is a collection of twelve short stories from Agatha Christie, including all of her most famous detectives among them and with a preface that is a relevant section of her autobiography complete with a poem that she wrote about her childhood. It also includes the original version of Witness for the Prosecution which was turned into a film in the 1950s starring Marlena Dietrich and has been running in a site-specific production at London’ in an actual courtroom’s County Hall for more than five years.

As is always the case with me and Christie (and in fact crime more generally), I enjoyed the ones with the regular detectives more than I enjoyed the standalone ones but they’re all pretty good and I read the whole book in less than a day, which again given that it was a work day says a lot about how much I was enjoying it!

This is on offer at the moment in Kindle, and Kobo. It also comes in a hardback edition. There are also three other short story collections – for the other seasons obviously – and Midwinter Murder is currently in Kindle Unlimited if you want some more.

Happy reading!

Book of the Week, Forgotten books, mystery

Book of the Week: Tour de Force

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Once again my attempts to get another British Library Crime Classics post written is thwarted by picking one as a BotW. Hey ho. These things happen.

Inspector Cockerill is on holiday. He’s already regretting leaving Britain on a package tour by the time the plan lands in Italy, but by the time the tour group make it to a tiny island off the Italian coast the whole tour group is consumed with tension and rivalries. And then one of them is murdered in the hotel. Cockerill believes the killer must be one of the people who was on the beach with him and sets out to try and figure out who is responsible before the local police pick who they think is the culprit.

This is the sixth mystery featuring Inspector Cockerill and was first published in 1955. It contains some of the attitudes to foreign people that you often spot in British books of this era, but the difference between this and say, Shirley Flight – Air Hostess, is that I’m fairly sure Christianna Brand is doing that as satire – or at least for humorous reasons. The actual murder itself is a really cleverly constructed “impossible crime” and there are certainly plenty of people with motives for it. And when the solution is unravelled you see that all the clues were there and you just missed them. It’s pretty good.

This only came out in July – and it’s currently in Kindle Unlimited, which means you won’t be able to get it on Kobo at the moment. But the BLCC have published several other Christianna Brand books and some of them are not in KU at the moment so you should be able to get hold of those on Kobo if you want – and they’re petty good too. Green for Danger was a BotW as well and I’ve reviewed Suddenly at His Residence as well.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Kingmaker

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As I said yesterday, it was a pretty easy choice this week. And this was actually the first book I finished last week – I didn’t manage to get it finished in time for the previous week’s list, and it would probably have been BotW last week instead of The Man Who Didn’t Fly (because there’s always a BLCC post in progress somewhere where I could write about that. But actually this works better in a way as this js somewhat Truman Capote adjacent and he would have been 100 yesterday, so sort of points to me on the timing of this review!

Pamela Harriman has crossed my reading path a couple of times in the past – most often as one of Truman Capote’s slightly more tangential Swans – namely the one who came and stole Slim Keith’s Husband and whose amorous exploits were among those featured in Capote’s notorious La Cote Basque 1965. Anway, Pamela’s reputation was as a modern courtesan, but in this book, Sonia Purnell sets out to re-examine Harriman’s life and legacy and position her as a secret political power player who learnt how to exercise soft power as Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law and took those lessons on to the rest of her life – to help Gianni Agnelli while they were lovers and then later to help the Democratic Party back to life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, culminating in her appointment as Ambassador to Paris by Bill Clinton and a role in American involvement in the Balkan conflict.

Considering that Harriman is most often referred to as a courtesan, or as someone who made a study of rich men’s ceilings, this is quite a reappraisal. But Purnell makes a strong case for Pamela as a woman who used the skills and talents that she had in the ways that were permitted as a woman at whatever the given time was, and then seeking to improve and better herself and her education throughout her life. I look forward to what I’m sure will be a number of articles in response to this to see what the response is but Purnell has had access to a wealth of papers and interviews to write the book and in her telling the story of Harriman’s life is remarkable and compelling – and hard to find parallels to.

My copy of Kingmaker came via NetGalley, but it came out in hardback about two weeks ago and so hopefully should be in the bookshops now. And of course it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading

Book of the Week, detective, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: The Man Who Didn’t Fly

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It’s been a while since I picked a British Library Crime classic, but I’m back with another one this week because it’s really good.

So, four men are due to fly on a plane to Dublin, but only three board. When it goes down in the Irish Sea, there are no bodies and the police have no idea who the man was who didn’t board the plane. And so they turn to the Wade family, who knew the four men due to fly, and question them to find out. Over the course of the book we find out about the dynamics of the household and try to work out who on earth was the man who didn’t fly.

According to the introduction it was the first novel to be nominated for the both the Golden Dagger and its American equivalent – and I can see why. For perspective also nominated for the Golden Dagger (then called the crossed red herring) that year was Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice. The following year it was won by previous BotW pick The Colour of Murder. It is not a conventional murder mystery and I’m going to warn you now: there are a lot of unlikeable characters in this one. But it’s so good. I read it in basically an evening and I didn’t care if it ended up making me go to sleep late. It’s that sort of book.

My copy came from a friend – who left a stack of secondhand BLCC’s with me because her bags were too full – but as with the others in the series it’s also on Kindle and I’m sure sooner or later it will turn up in their KU selection.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Going Infinite

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Long-time readers will remember that I love a book or a podcast about a business disaster, and this week’s BotW pick is indeed a business disaster, but also a very quick turnaround on one of the big financial collapses of recent times.

Michael Lewis is the author of among other things The Big Short and Moneyball, and was working on a book about Sam Bankman Fried as the whole FTX collapse unfolded. And Going Infinite is the result – the story of the rise and fall of the world’s youngest billionaire and the crypto empire he founded. I should probably explain SBF as he’s known shouldn’t I? For a couple of years he was the bright young thing of the financial world – the wunderkid who had left the trading firm he worked for to found a crypto trading firm and then a crypto exchange. All of this made him the poster boy of Crypto and his friendly nerd persona – wild hair, constantly multitasking and playing computer games while doing TV interviews – right up until the point where it all came crashing down and he ended up on trial for fraud.

On the one hand, this has the fact that Lewis was on the scene when the collapse happened and so this is informed by first hand observations and interviews with the players involved. On the other hand, Lewis went into this endeavour expecting to write one thing and ended up with a breaking news story on his hands and clearly got the book out as quickly as possible after it all happened – this came out in the US just as the trial was starting. On the other hand, I’m not sure the whole thing was quite resolved enough that the point it was being written for it to have a strong enough central thesis.

I read this in less than 36 hours – but I have also read a lot of long reads and listened to at least three different podcast series about SBF and FTX so part of the interest for me is seeing how they all compare to each other and how the story is changing and evolving. So i don’t know how this is going to hold up in a year’s time – this paperback has already been added to with an epilogue about the court case – but for now, it’s the most in-depth look at it all that I’ve found.

You can buy Going Infinite on Kindle, Kobo or in paperback – and it should be fairly easy to get hold of as it’s a high profile author on a big, well known scandal/court case.

Happy reading!

Book of the Week, books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Guard Your Daughters

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Today’s pick is part of the bounty from that Persephone trip I mentioned on Saturday. And I’m quite pleased with my choice!

Guard Your Daughters is the story of a family of five sisters – four of whom are still living at home, whilst the oldest has recently married. It’s the early 1950s and their mother stops the girls from going to school, or making friends – and if she can from leaving the house at all. Their father is a mystery writer and devoted to his wife and to keeping her from being made ill by goings on around d her. Told by Morgan, the middle sister, in some ways it’s a light and fluffy book as you follow the day to day lives of the girls. But under that there is a darker secret.

I remember my mum saying to me once that as a parent it is your job to bring your children up so that they can go out into the world and live independently without you. On that front, Morgan’s parents appear to have failed big style. The elder girls had a governess, but she left some time before the start of the novel and the youngest sister, Theresa, is going without a proper education and is busy trying to make sure no one forces her out of the world that she’s made for herself. And the elder girls seem to being kept in the sort of splendid isolation that a strict Victorian father might have come up with – encouraged to work on accomplishments – despite the fact that the world has changed. How did eldest sister Pandora manage to escape in marriage? Well read it and you’ll find out.

Interestingly Persephone have included a selection of reader reactions to the end of the book – because this is a bit of a polarising one. I can’t say that I liked many of the characters but I was fascinated to see what was actually going on in the household. I’ve seen some people compare it to I Capture the Castle and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, although this is darker than I remember that being. Anyway, I read it in less than a day and it gave me lots of thoughts, so I recommend it!

My copy came from Persephone in Bath – you can order direct from them or you may be able to find it (or order it) in larger bookstores

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

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A historical fiction pick today, and one that has taken me a while to read on account of my brain’s refusal to concentrate on long books when I’m tired and my uncertainty on how things were going to turn out and my current need for closure and happy endings!

It’s 1919, the war is over and the world is starting to return to normal. Except that normal seems to mean that all the gains that women have made during the war are being rolled back and having had a taste of independence the world is now trying to relegate them back to domesticity. Helen Simonson’s new novel focuses on three characters trying to figure out what their place is in the post-war world. Constance had taken over the management of an estate, but is now losing her job and her home to make way for returning men. After nursing the mother of her employer through influenza, she is sent with her to the seaside, where she meets Poppy and her group of lady motorcycle riders, and Poppy’s brother Harris, an injured wartime pilot who is still coming to terms with his new reality. And then there is Klaus, German by birth but a naturalised British citizen, who has got a job as a waiter again, but is finding that he has to keep a low profile on account of his name and accent.

This is a smart and thought-provoking novel set at an interesting time that is ripe for fiction. It’s also a coming of age story, but there is a deal of darkness to balance the tea dances and parties. The interwar period is one that I love reading about – but I haven’t read a lot of fiction set exclusively at the start of that period, and it gave me plenty to think about as well.

My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out now and available on Kindle, Kobo and in hardback.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, books, Children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Film Stars at Riverlea

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It’s only right that the week after Book Conference, my book of the Week pick is a bonkers Girls Own boarding school story. So buckle up, this has got a lot of plot to get though…

I was going to say that I don’t know where to start on the plot, but I do: the start, because this opens on a twin arriving at Riverlea having run away from the boarding school she was attending after the parents decided they would be better apart from each other. And it only gets wilder from there. It’s got (not in order and not exhaustive) film stars, vindictive PE teachers, hidden talents, missing treasure, salvation through cricket, missing heirs, near drowning and a shipwreck. And those last are not at the same time. And it’s only just over 200 pages long.

Now I normally like my school stories a little saner – if by saner we mean the realistic (in comparison) boarding school in the Alps where you might get lost up a mountain that Elinor M Brent Dyer offers. But sometimes you just need something crazy. This was a great way to spend an evening and I thank my friend for letting me read it first.

I can’t even tell you where to get this – it’s long out of print and I’ve never seen it before – but I’m also not expecting many of you to want to read it because it’s niche. So niche. But also hilarious.

Happy Reading!