Tag: book reviews

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Cold War-set mysteries

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After Beattie Cavendish and the Highland Hideaway was a book of the Week in January, I’ve been on a little run of other historical mysteries with a Cold War or spy setting. And as you could see from yesterday’s BotW post that’s now culminated in my finally getting around to reading the John le Carré books I have in the backlog. But those of course were written contemporaneously to the events they depict (pretty much) so for this post I’m talking about historical mysteries – aka the stuff that’s been written recently but is set in that time period. And I am starting to wonder if a 1950s setting is the new trend in historical mysteries, taking over from the interwar period. But maybe I’m just spotting more of them because I’m looking for them at the moment? Anyway to the reviews:

Mrs Spy by M J Rowbotham*

As far as everyone else knows, Maggie Flynn is a widowed single mum who moved back in with her mother after her husband’s death. But she’s actually an MI5 operative, following in the footsteps of her husband whose work in the world of spies she only discovered after his death. But when she is assigned to guard a Russian defector for the day, she discovers that he knew her husband and suspects his death was because he was betrayed by someone he thought was on his side. So she sets out to discover what really happened to him while keeping it a secret from her teenage daughter who is more concerned about whether her mum can get her Beatles tickets. Maggie’s job is mostly observation and surveillance rather than derring do so when she finds herself conducting her own operations it’s a steep learning curve for her. This took me a little while to get into mostly because it took me a while to twig that it was meant to be humourous as well as murderous, but once I did I found this really readable. I liked the references to Bond films and other spy thrillers and Maggie is an engaging heroine and the good news is that this has a sequel out in the summer.

Under Admiralty Arch by S J T Riley*

This is the third in a series featuring newspaper crime reporter Robert Lynnford in the early 1950s. I read the first in the series a couple of years ago and thought that it was a good mystery albeit witha lot of plot but didn’t do the best job at explaining some of the background and details (sort of the reverse of an info dump problem!) but didn’t realise that when I requested it from NetGalley. Still it was nice to drop in again to see what’s changed. And actually there are some similar issues here – the plot is very complicated, with a big cast of characters that can get a bit confusing because there’s not a lot of detail to differentiate them from each other. But the underlying mystery is interesting and I wanted to see who did it. This is definitely going more towards the adventure-mystery end of the genre, with plenty of car chases and more than a few fights.

The Queen Who Came in From The Cold by S J Bennett

In the fifth the H M The Queen Investigates series, it is 1961 and preparations are underway for a state visit to Italy on the Royal Yacht Britannia. But before the trip, there is a visit to Lancashire to accomplish. On the royal train up though a guest claims to have witnessed a murder through the window. The Queen and her assistant private secretary Joan start to investigate and find themselves tangled up in all sorts of Cold War plotting. This is the second book in the series that has been set in the past, and we find ourselves a couple of years after that previous instalment (early 60s compared to late 50s) and the world is changing fast. The Soviets are on the brink of winning the space race and there as spies being uncovered all over the place. So it’s fitting that this is a spy related story – complete with references to James Bond novels and Stephen Ward. I enjoyed this a lot – it’s a fun world to spend some time in and even better (in my mind) now we’re back in the past.

And that’s your lot for today. There was another on recent read that could have been included in this – but it would have been a bit of a spoiler for the resolution. But again, it would be a spoiler to tell you which one! But this is a very good opportunity to mention that there is a new H M the Queen Investigates coming in October called Death on the Royal Yacht which is very good news indeed.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, first in series, Thriller

Book of the Week: Call for the Dead

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Happy Tuesday everyone, and I’m kicking off a slightly espionage themed week here on the blog with a thriller that’s an absolute classic of the genre.

Cover of Call for the Dead

A Call for the Dead is the first novel that features John le Carré’s most famous creation. When a civil servant kills himself after being the subject of a routine security check, George Smiley finds himself in the firing line as the person who carried out said security check. In order to dodge the finger of blame from his boss, Maston, Smiley begins his own investigation into the death. He’s warned off the case – but that evening receives a letter from the dead man. Do the East Germans know more about this than Circus think? Smiley is determined to find out.

Le Carré is said to have created Smiley as an antidote to James Bond – rather than glamorous women and high octane chases, Smiley’s Circus is a world of anonymous men doing paperwork and following routine. But although that might sound boring, what is on the page is compulsively page turning as you try to work out what on earth is going on. I read this and went straight on to the next book in the series, A Murder of Quality, which is completely different in terms of what Smiley is investigating, but just as good. And fortunately for me I had the third book waiting for me when I finished the second. Because of course this is one of those situations where I have been buying up the books when they appear in Kindle sales (because I enjoyed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy so much) and then not getting around to reading them. But clearly this is the time to remedy that – it’s a classic for a reason. And it’s not a particularly long classic either – it’s under 200 pages but so much happens in it and it packs such a punch that it feels like a much longer book. So good.

You don’t need me to tell you how easy this is to get hold of – it was published in 1961 and it has been in print ever since in various iterations, including as a Penguin Classic. It’s available in every format, including as an audiobook written by the peerless Simon Russell Beale.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Wyndham Case

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It’s Tuesday again and I’m continuing my pattern of picking a mystery for Book of the Week fifty percent of the time this year! I was going to say every other week, but it’s not strictly every other week, it does go in patches – a couple of mysteries, a couple of romances, one mystery, one romance – you get the pictures. Anyway: The Wyndham Case.

St Agatha’s College, Cambridge has a collection of books donated to them in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately the books are now completely uninteresting to scholars and come with a lot of strings attached. And on this particular morning they also have a dead body lying in front of them. Imogen Quy is one of the first on the scene in her role as college nurse and isn’t convinced with the idea that it was suicide – or that the dead student was stealing books. And then another student is found dead in the college fountain.

I have been wanting to read the Imogen Quy series for a while, after enjoying Jill Paton Walsh’s Wimsey continuations and during my wanderings post-Word on the Water last week (more on this on Saturday) I bought this. And I’m so glad I did because I really enjoyed it and it was a proper one sitting read for me. In the introduction to that first Wimsey continuation, Paton Walsh mentions that Gaudy Night was one of the reasons why she wanted to go to Oxford and she’s done a really good job in this of creating her on fictional college, this time in Cambridge (which is where she lived). The mystery is pretty good and the collection of students that you encounter feels pretty realistic for the time that it was written (early 1990s). My mum was a solicitor at one point in her life – and she’s done a lot of fundraising over the years, so the complicated bequest of the Wyndham collection was particularly appealing to me as well.

There are four books in this series – and the bad news for the to-read pile is that I know that the bookshop I bought this from has the next two in the series, and it’s pretty easy for me to get back there in the not to distant future! I’m not telling you which bookshop it is in case you get there before me, because I don’t think they’re strictly in print anymore but they seem to be fairly easy to get second hand. And they’re also in Kindle, Kobo and on audio too.

Happy Reading!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommensday: April 2026 Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month and of course you know what that means. So here I am with three reviews of some of the other books I read in April.

Madonna of Darkness by Hugh Morrison

This is the latest book in Hugh Morrison’s series about Reverend Shaw, a vicar in the 1930s who also has a bit of a sideline in stumbling across murders and intrigue. This one sees him at a fete in a neighbouring village where a new vicar has been causing ructions within the community with his views. But when the troublesome minster is found dead in the church shortly after cancelling the fete he starts to investigate. This has got religious art, more of Morrison’s son than we have previously seen and quite a lot of adventure-thriller along with the mystery.

The Geomagician by Jennifer Mandula*

I’m reporting back in on this one as I featured it in release week. As I said in that post, I was hoping for something in the Emily Wilde, Legends and Lattes ends of the spectrum when I started reading it, but having finished it’s actually closer to the Shades of Magic ends of the spectrum. It’s not a apocalypse-end-of-the-whole-world scenario here but it is very much life and death and future of society one. It’s also got a lot more religion in it than I was expecting – I wasn’t expecting a religious inquisition and battle between church and magic type situation from the blurb either. It felt a lot like Philippa Gregory Tudor fiction-type stakes but in a Victorian setting and with dinosaurs (and Gregory does have magic in some of hers so maybe that’s fair?) and that wasn’t really what I was hoping for – and I’m note sure that’s what the blurb is selling so there may well be a mismatch of expectations of readers going in with what is delivered. There is a second book and there are plot threads left hanging, but I’m not sure I care enough to slog through it when it comes out to find out!

Mr Campion’s Fox by Mike Ripley

One of my holiday reads was a new murder mystery by Mike Ripley that’s coming out at the start of June. I enjoyed it (more on that closer to the time) and when I was looking at Goodreads I realised that Ripley has written some Albert Campion continuations and that I had some of them on the pile and went back to try one. This is 1960s set and sees Campion recruited by the Danish ambassador to observe an unsuitable man that his daughter has become entangled with. But when the daughter goes missing and the boyfriend turns up dead, Albert – along with his wife and son – are in the middle of a mystery again. This has got all the regulars that you could hope for in a Campion book and the setting was reminiscent of Sweet Danger (one of my favourites of the season) but I didn’t love the actual writing style – it wasn’t quite Allingham and I think I might like Ripley more when he’s writing as himself. I do have another of these on the pile so I will give that a go and see how that one pans out.

And that’s your lot for this month. In case you missed them the other April Recommensdays were Recent Romance reads, Non-fiction about Literary Figures and What I read on my Holiday. The books of the week were Sky High, While You were Seething, D is for Death and How to Solve Your Own Murder.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, non-fiction, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Non fiction round up – Literary Figures edition

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It’s been a while, so for this Wednesday’s post I have a non-fiction Recommendsday for you. And as promised yesterday, it sort of ties in with D is for Death a little bit which is a delightful coincidence that I didn’t really realise when I started reading D is for Death after I finished Square Haunting last week – which was the last book I needed to finish reading to finish this post off!

Square Haunting by Francesca Wade

This is a group biography of literary and academic women who are loosely tied together by having lived in Mecklenberg Square. The most celebrated of the five is Virginia Woolf who is the final of the five, but the one that I was most interested in (unsurprisingly) was Dorothy L Sayers – who was living in Mecklenberg Square when she created Peter Wimsey. I’ve written about my love of Sayers’s Gaudy Night before, but the problem at the core of that book, can a woman have her own life and intellectual pursuits and identity and be in a relationship, is a key theme running through this whole book too. The early 20th century was a time when a woman’s right to an academic education was still a matter of debate, and several of the women in this book were at the vanguard of the fight. I found some of the lives more interesting than others (as is always the case) but definitely wouldn’t have heard of or known anything about some of the women without having picked the book up because of the Sayers of it all. Definitely worth reading and one of the more successful group biographies I’ve read. And just to tie it back to D is For Death, here’s a link to a podcast where Harriet Evans and Francesca Wade are talking about Gaudy Night. You’re welcome.

Five Love Affairs and a Friendship by Anne de Courcy

Cover of Five Love Affairs and a Friendship

Anne de Courcy turns her focus on Nancy Cunard in this one. Cunard was an heiress (her father was one of the shipping line Cunards) and was part of a pre-Great War literary circle and then went on to spend the 1920s deeply enmeshed in the literary movement in Paris. She was a muse to many writers of the time – some of whom were also her lovers – and set up her own literary press, before going on to fight racism and fascism. She led quite a sad life in many ways – and this book doesn’t shy away from that, but it’s a really interesting read and a good look at the Parisian side of the roaring twenties. I’m not sure it’s your best place to start with de Courcy though – if you haven’t read any of her books before I might start with The Fishing Fleet or Chanel’s Riviera.

The Crichel Boys by Simon Fenwick

paperback copy of The Crichel Boys on a sun lounger

This is a group biography of Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys who bought Long Crichel Rectory in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Later they are joined by Raymond Mortimer to form a sort of surrogate family and literary Salon (per the author) that lasted across the rest of the century. I’d never heard of this before I saw the book, but they seemed adjacent to the sort of inter-war Bright Young Things set that I’m always fascinated by (and have read a lot about at this point) so I gave it a go. The big problem for me is that there’s not actually enough to say about the core four (so to speak) so it has to expand out to the rest of their circle. And while that does include Nancy Mitford, Cecil Beaton, various Bloomsbury-set types, Benjamin Britten and more, in doing that there’s a lot of jumping backwards and forwards in time as you get sections on various people and it starts to get very confusing. So not entirely successful, but not a disaster either – Square Haunting definitely worked better!Almost the best thing about it for me was the passing mention of Gervase Jackson-Stops and Horton Menagerie – which is just down the road from where I grew up.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, detective, historical

Book of the Week: D is for Death

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Happy Tuesday everyone. And I’m back with a murder mystery this week after taking a break for romance with While You Were Seething last week.

It’s 1935 and Dora is on the run from a fiancée she didn’t want in the first place. When she arrives in London she finds he has followed her there and hides in the London Library together away from him. Except inside the library she finds a dead body. Now she’s inside her first murder investigation and she is not the girl to walk away. She’s a book lover who particularly likes detective fiction but who is also the sort of person who notices everything and she’s sure she can help Detective Inspector Fox. He however is not so convinced.

Harriet F Townson is actually Harriet Evans writing under a different name to differentiate this from her usual genre. Because this is a historical mystery romp. It really is a romp. Dora is a delightfully quirky heroine and the plot just rattles along as she makes new friends in London, meets old friends and tries to solve the crime. There are references galore to the golden age of crime – including one of the characters living in Mecklenberg Square – home of Dorothy L Sayers in real life (more on that tomorrow) and her creation Harriet Vane (in the Gaudy Night).

I raced through this in one evening basically and I really hope there is a sequel because Dora is a lot of fun and there are enough plot threads left hanging to suggest it’s a possibility. It was also nominated for a Crime Writers Association Award so that’s got to help to right? This has got comps in the blurb with the aforementioned Sayers as well as Margery Allingham, Enola Holmes (only watched the Netflix films) and I Capture the Castle which sounds a bit bonkers on the eclectic front but I sort of endorse that! If you (like me!) like series like Veronica Speedwell, Daisy Dalrymple or Phryne Fisher, this is definitely worth a look.

I read this on Kindle, but it’s also in Kobo and should be available in paperback too

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Sky High

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It’s Tuesday so so here I am with another Book of the Week – and I’m back with the British Library’s Crime Classics series this week, making it two (albeit very different) murder mysteries in a row for my picks.

Cover of Sky High

Brimberley is a peaceful village, where everyone knows everyone else and very little happens. That is until the lead tenor in the village choir is killed by an explosion at his house. Choir leader Liz, her son Tim (a former commando) and a retired general are soon investigating to try and work out what’s happened. This was first published in 1955 and the post-World War Two world is very evident here – there are lots of ex military men of various types and vintages who may or may not be involved in the murder – and may or may not still be involved with the military. Some of my favourite of the Miss Marple plots revolve around issues thrown up by the aftermath of the war – I’m thinking of Brian Eastley in 4.50 from Paddington or the food rationing and bartering in A Murder is Announced that mean people can’t tell the police everything they are up to (and also a mega plot spoiler that I can’t explain) – which may be why this worked so well for me despite feeling a bit far-fetched at times!

This was a Janurary 2026 release in the BLCC series and I was pleased to see it pop up in Kindle Unlimited already. I read and enjoyed Michael Gilbert’s Smallbone, Deceased a year or two back which drew on Gilbert’s experience as a solicitor, while this one captures small village life in the 1950s with classic murder mystery mixing with spy thriller in a really pleasing way. I’ve got another of Gilbert’s books on the shelf and I’m moving it up the list now because I enjoyed this so much.

As I mentioned, this is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment which means it isn’t on Kobo right now, but it is available in paperback from the British Library online shop where once again they are running their three for two offer.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, cozy crime, first in series

Book of the Week: The French Bookshop Murder

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I said yesterday that I wasn’t sure what I was going to pick today and it turns out it’s actually a book I finished on Monday. But that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Zoe Pascal has relocated from her life in England to a small village in southern France where she is going to run a bookshop. But when she arrives in Sainte Catherine the locals are strangely hostile and there’s an undercurrent in the village that she just doesn’t understand. Then the body of a tourist is found in the local church – not long after she was due to meet Zoe. Suddenly Zoe finds herself under even more suspicion – from the gendarmes now as well as the locals. So she sets to to try and undercover the killer and the mystery at the heart of the village.

This is a lot of fun, with a really good puzzle as well as the murder mystery. I had a few bits figured out, but not all of it and I really enjoyed the village setting and the cast of characters. I could really picture the historic houses and Provençal countryside. There appears to be a tie in going on with a prior series by Greg Mosse, which I will be tempted to pick up – but there is a sequel to this to read first!

This is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, but it’s also still available on Kobo and there is a paperback too, although as only one of the London Waterstones‘ has it on click and collect you may have to have a bit of a hunt for it.

Happy Reading!

book round-ups, Recommendsday, series

Recommendsday: First in series…

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Happy Wednesday everyone, this week I’ve got a mixed bag of first books in series that I have recently read – we’ve got one fantasy, one historical mystery and one cozy crime, which may not be entirely representative of my general reading over the year, but is actually fairly representative of where my reading is at at the moment, minus a romance but I’m mostly reading standalone romances rather than series at the moment so I didn’t have one I could include!

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

After having enjoyed Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter so much last month, I went out and bought the first in Heather Fawcett’s previous series (yes I know, I’m repeating an author, but hey I make and break my own rules) about a professor who studies faeries and folklore. Emily Wilde has gone to visit a village in the far north to study the Hidden Ones, their local fae. She doesn’t want to talk to the locals and she is less than pleased when one of her colleagues from Cambridge turns up to help her. I really loved the world building and the characters are great. I felt like Fawcett did a really good job of explaining how the world works without info dumping on you and the two main plot strands – what are the fairies up to and who is Wendell Bartlett – provided plenty of action without being too stressful. Cozy fantasy so good I have already acquired the rest of the trilogy…

Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claud Izner

This is the first in a series of books featuring bookseller Victor Legris in late nineteenth century Paris. In this it’s 1889 and Paris is a buzz with the World Exposition. Victor witnesses a woman’s death on the viewing platform of the brand new Eiffel Tower and doesn’t think that the official explanation is the right one. Soon he’s ducking and weaving around Paris trying to work out what happened and who did it and more people start to die. The original French version of this won the Prix Michel-Lebrun in 2003, which is a prize for French crime novels, which I thought was a good sign, but I was obviously reading it in English and although the mystery is good I found the writing style quite hard going, but that could of course be the fault of the translator. I bought this on my trip to Paris about 18 months ago so it’s taken me a while to get to and I do have the second on the shelf already ahving spotted it cheap second hand. So I’ll give that a go at some point and see if it grows on me.

Jammed with Secrets by Selina Hill*

This is the first in a new series of small town cozy crimes and sees Sadie, a disgraced chef return to her home town to try and rebuild her life. She’s trying to do this by running food trailers at a local music festival when a member of a 90s boyband is found dead in one of them. Not satisfied with the police investigation, Sadie starts to investigate herself to try and save her business. The actual murder mystery plot was pretty good – but the problem here is Sadie. There are some issues with her backstory that make it hard for the reader to sympathise with her and entirely understandable why the people in town wouldn’t want to eat her food. This is a problem entirely of the author’s own creation – and made me wonder why it wasn’t set up differently. And that’s all I can say without spoilers, but this is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment if you want to go and find out what I’m talking about!

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: Slow Dance

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We’re less than a month away from the release of Rainbow Rowell’s new novel Cherry Baby, so I thought I could probably risk reading her previous adult work now. You know what I’m like about saving things sometimes. Anyway, I wasn’t feeling very well last week so it seemed like a good potential treat in a week when I needed one. And here it is, this week’s BotW,

Shiloh and Cary were best friends in high school. The two of them and the third member of their trio Mikey were inseparable. But it was Shiloh and Cary that everyone thought would end up together. But they didn’t – and more than a decade later they’re going to meet for the first time in years at Mikey’s second wedding. Shiloh’s divorced with two small kids and Cary’s in the Navy, spending months at a time at sea. But is this the time that they will finally work out that they’re meant to be together?

This jumps backwards and forwards between the characters’ present day, high school and college showing how things were, how it fell apart and how they’re trying to make it work. I ended up really enjoying this, but I did have a few frustrations about it. Both characters needed to use their words more and have actual conversations, but I understood why they didn’t as teens because both had complicated home situations that they were working their way through. However, being inside Shiloh’s head made me anxious some of the time because the self sabotage was very real. But perhaps that’s what makes you root for them so much. This made me feel quite on edge through the final third, waiting for it all to fall apart again, but actually the resolution was pretty good. I can find military heroes a bit trying, but I understood why Cary was joining the Navy and what it was doing for him, but it was very much in the subtext and I felt like Shiloh’s lack of understanding about as a teen that was quite out of character for her considering how smart she was in other ways.

I can see that it won’t be for everyone – common threads in reviews that haven’t enjoyed it are around Shiloh being too hard to care for because of a perceived “too cool for school” or “not like other girls” type personality, or the characters not changing/developing as the years pass, but honestly I read Shiloh more as stand-offish and not letting people get close to her because if people are close they can hurt you (or judge you) more than anything else, and I think they did grow and change although it’s mostly in the subtext rather than one character overtly saying “OMG you would never have done that when we were at school” or similar. But I read this across about 24 hours and was smiling at the end, so that’s a pretty good recommendation and if you look at how much I’ve written about it, it will at least make you think!

My copy of Slow Dance came from NetGalley (yes I know, I told you I was behind) but it’s out in paperback now as well as in Kindle and Kobo. Rowell has a new book out in April, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a price drop on the ebook price next month to go with the new release. You should be able to find it in bigger bookshops relatively easily too.

Happy Reading