A different pick this week for BotW as it’s a beauty book. I’ve had Pretty Honest on the shelf for a while – and have dipped in and out and read bits here and there (and bought a copy as a present for 13 year old cousin after reading the teen beauty section). But the last week or two I sat myself down and read it from cover to cover. And it’s really good.
Sali Hughes is a beauty writer and journalist. This is here guide to all things beauty, make up and grooming and it’s really, really good. It covers pretty much everything – from skin care routines and the best makeup routine for the train to bridal make-up, post-baby beauty and how to look the best you can in pretty much every circumstance.
It’s heavy on text, not on pictures, but I didn’t feel like I needed a storyboard to work out what Sali was telling me. It’s a little bit having a funny mate who knows everything about looking amazing chatting to you to help you and stop you making stupid mistakes. And unlike some beauty manuals I’ve read, it’s not trying to turn out clones of the writer. Sali may prefer red lippy, but she’s not going to force it on you. She just wants you to know how to do your chosen look the best you can – and be totally confident about it in the process. What’s not to love?
In fact the only downside of Pretty Honest is that I now have a list of extra things that I want to buy and know I need to do a clear out of my make up and beauty drawer(s)! I reckon you should be able to get Pretty Honest at any good bookshop. My copy is a very giftable (and Sali has ideas about that too which I may implement) hardback – but it’s out in paperback now too. For your ease and convienience, here’s a link to the pretty pink paperback on Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones – all three also have the hardback too.
The Fahrenheit Book Club subscription comes up trumps again – this time with Derek Farrell’s Death of a Nobody – the second book in the Danny Bird series. You may remember me raving about Death of a Diva in my Easter Recommendations post but as it didn’t get a BotW then, it means I can do this one now – Hurrah.
So, to fill you in. Danny Bird runs a pub in South London. He hopes it’s an up and coming gastro pub, after his attempt to turn it into a gay bar resulted in a corpse. Sadly he’s being hampered the fact that the pub’s owned by a mobster, who has also foisted an unwilling and unpaid extra employee on him. On top of this they’ve got a post-funeral do to cater for a local girl turned Lady. Danny’s already been asked to investigate some poison pen letters when a corpse turns up in the loo. Soon he, Lady Caroline, the Asbo Twins and the gang are in the midst of a murder mystery in high(ish) society.
What I really like about these books is the humour. It’s snarky and caustic and everyone gets some great zingers. My favourite in this one is possible when Caz describes Danny as “Poirot on poppers” – which made me attract attention to myself on the train by snorting with laughter. It’s not graphic or violent – the gore level is pretty much cozy crime – but this is much more fun and sly than stories about bakers or home decorators or country policemen. Imagine a Gay Stephanie Plum was running a pub instead of chasing criminals, but kept stumbling across bodies and you’re sort of kind of half way there. Maybe.
And the supporting cast are a hoot too. The dynamic between the pub’s workers is a joy – and the gang have everything you need to make you laugh – a posh bird, the Asbo twins (who do exactly what they say on the tin), a hard boiled bar managed and a gangster’s spoilt little princess with her own criminal tendencies. If that doesn’t sell it to you I don’t know what will.
Get your copy from Kindle or if you like the sound of it and Death of a Diva and the Sam Jones series, then you might want to look at the Fahrenheit Press Book Club – for a stream of crime fiction appearing through your inbox through the year.
A tricky choice for BotW this week – I loved the Ben Aaronovitch that I read last week, but it is the 5th in the series (not including comics) and you really should read them in order. And I already wrote about the first book Rivers of London in a previous BotW post 11 months ago and I recommended it in one of the Christmas Gift guides. So it felt a little overkill (so just go buy the first one). But the latest Angela Thirkell release from Virago was a lot of fun – even if it wasn’t my favourite of hers – but that bar is pretty high!
Northbridge Rectory is the tenth of Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels – they started in the 1930s and by this point we’ve reached the war years. There are officers billeted at the Rectory, where Mrs Villars is struggling to adapt to life as a Rector’s wife rather than a Headmistress’s wife. There are some transferable skills though… Northbridge’s unmarried ladies, widowed ladies and officious ladies are all out in force – taking control of the war effort and trying to assert their authority over each other as best they can.
Thirkell excels in creating believable grotesques – her books fill a similar hole for me as the Mapp and Lucia ones, except that in a Barsetshire novel they are the side dish not the main course. In this one we get a truly terrible officer’s wife – who has not idea how horrible she is, an old maid who likes to suffer and who has been cultivating a spineless writer who has his own issues, a vicar who is trying to escape the attentions of his elderly lady parishoners and an officer who doesn’t realise that he’s talking himself into a transfer.
A trip to Barsetshire is always fun and there are some familiar faces here too. I still think that Summer Half is my favourite – closely followed by High Rising and Pomfret Towers. I’m thrilled that Virago are reissuing them – even if I’m a little bit annoyed that some of them are e-book only because I wanted a matching set in paperback. Get your copy from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones or if you don’t want the paperbacks you can get the Kindle edition. I’m off to make puppy dog eyes at Before Lunch and try to resist breaking the book-buying embargo.
I had real problems chosing my BotW this week – a fair few things that I liked, but several were sequels where you really need to have read the preceeding book. So I went left field and I’m going for Mystery and Mayhem – an anthology of middle grade mystery stories.
Mystery and Mayhem in the wild! (ie a bookshop)
Now I was attracted to this because it has stories from Robin Stevens and Katherine Woodfine who I’ve read and really liked recently. But there are lots of stories to like here. They’re not all historical – some are set right here and now – they’re not all tie-ins to other books (and even if they are you don’t need to have read the novels they’re linked to), there’s all types of heroes and all types of mysteries.
I enjoyed them all – and even worked out who had done it a fair few times, which wasn’t a problem, because the introduction basically tells you to try and figure it out for yourself! I’ve also got a big old list of authors to go find more stories by now, but only once the pile is shorter obviously.
If you’re a grown up who likes kids books still (aka my kind of person) then this will fill an afternoon nicely. If you have a upper primary school age kid (aka middle-grader) who has read some Wells and Wong or some Clockwork Sparrow and is looking for something else to try, this would be a good place to find some ideas. Equally if you’re desperate for your under 11 to get into murder mysteries but you think they’re too young for Agatha Christie (they probably are, I got the heebie jeebies from reading Miss Marple and Poirot in year 6) then this would really work really well for them too.
My copy came from NetGalley, but I’m hoping this is going to be everywhere – I know it’s in Waterstones because that’s where I took my photo – but here’s the link for Amazon, Kindle and Foyles as well. Go forth and read crime for kids!
Back to detective fiction for this week’s BotW which is Alan Bradley’s fifth Flavia de Luce book. Unusually for me these days, I’m reading this series out of order – I read the first book first, but the only others I’ve read in the series are the two which follow this one.
In Book 5 we join our heroine as the village is preparing for the exhumation of their local saint from the church yard to mark the 500th anniversary of his death. But when they open the tomb, instead of a skeleton they find the recently deceased church organist and the pre-teen detective can’t help but start to investigate…
In the first book, Flavia trod a fine line for me – between engagingly and clever and irritatingly precocious. In this book (and the other later ones that I’ve read) she’s smart, with some pretty peculiar interests, but doesn’t ever cross too far over into preternaturally omnipotent! Aside from her sisters, most of her relationships are with adults and I enjoyed watching how the different adults interact with her – and their varying success (in her opinion) in treating her “properly”.
This was a fun page-turner, I had my suspicions about the culprit but couldn’t figure out the hows and whys – but the explanation was ingenious. I’m obviously still enjoying the series despite reading it out of order – you should be able to find Flavia’s adventures (where ever you want to start with them) in all good bookshops and online or, as I did, at your local library.
Easter is upon us again – early this year – and so I thought I’d throw some suggestions out there for books for reading over the bank holiday weekend, or the Easter holidays if you’re lucky enough to have them.
The Night That Changed Everything by Laura Tait and Jimmy Rice
I love the cover of this book – can’t explain why, but it just speaks to me
Rebecca and Ben are perfect for each other – blissfully happy, they’re made for each other. But when a secret from the past is accidentally revealed, their love story is rewritten. Can they recover? Is it possible to forgive and forget? This came out yesterday (Thursday), but I was lucky to have an advance copy which I finished on the train home from work just after midnight on Thursday morning. I really, really, enjoyed Rebecca and Ben’s story – which, as you can probably tell from my synopsis, is not your traditional romantic comedy. It nearly had me crying on the train – which doesn’t happen very often (in part because I try not to read books that will make me cry on the train!) and I had trouble putting it down. I didn’t even notice I’d arrived at Euston on the way to work on Wednesday I was so engrossed – if it wasn’t the end of the line I would have missed my stop! On top of everything else going for it, I had no idea where it was going. I suspect this is going to be on a lot of beach reading lists this year – get there ahead of the game and read it now. I’m hoping this will be in the supermarkets and all over the place – but here are the traditional links: Amazon, Kindle, Waterstones, Foyles, Kobo.
Death of a Diva by Derek Farrell
Danny Bird has lost his job, his boyfriend and his home. So of course the logical solution to this is to take over a dive of a pub owned by a gangster and try and transform it into a fabulous nightspot. But then his big act for the opening night turns up dead in the dressing room surrounded by a cloud of powder that’s definitely not talc and he’s the prime suspect in a murder inquiry. This is funny and clever – I was laughing out loud as I tried to figure out who was responsible. Danny is a fabulous character – and is surrounded by a great supporting cast. There’s lots of potential here – this is another winner from Fahrenheit Press – who you may have noticed have been providing a lot of my favourite crime reads recently. Get your copy on Kindle and badger Fahrenheit on Twitter to get it on other platforms. I got my copy free when it was on promotion a couple of weekends ago (it came out before the Fahrenheit subscription) – this weekend their free book for Easter is Fidelis Morgan’s Unnatural Fire – which is high on my to-read pile – as I loved The Murder Quadrille as you may remember.
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
Harriet and her granddaughter Grace are governesses at the same house, nearly 50 years apart. Grace has been raised on stories of Fenix House – but once she’s arrived it’s clear that her grandmother may be a less than reliable narrator. I reviewed this for Novelicious (check out my full review here) and basically this is the book that is going to fill the Victorian-time-slip-upstairs-downstairs gap in your life. Secrets, lies, families, relationships -they’re all there in this twisty and intriguing book – which had me poleaxed at the end. If you liked Letters to the Lost, or the Mysterious Affair at Castaway House, or any of Lauren Willig’s stand-alone novels like The Ashford Affair then this is for you.
Jolly Foul Play by Robin Stevens
Hazel and Daisy are back on the detection trail after Deepdean’s new head girl is found dead during a fireworks display. I haven’t finished the latest Wells and Wong mystery yet (it’s another that came out on Thursday – I started it as soon as my pre-order dropped on to my kindle) but if it’s half as good as the other three it’ll be a delight. One for the 8 to 12 year old in your house – and your inner child as well.
What am I going to be reading this Easter weekend? Well, I’m hoping to finish Hazel and Daisy’s adventures on my Good Friday commutes, then I think I might try to fill the Night Circus-shaped void in my life with Ben Aaronovitch’s Broken Homes or my urge for more time-slip books with the rest of Beatriz Williams’ latest or Lucinda Riley’s The Seven Sisters. Any other recommendations gratefully received in the comments – although I’m meant to be on a book-buying ban!
This week’s book of the week is Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. In another tale of the state of the pile, this was a Christmas book from my mother in 2014. In my defence, it did get a bit misplaced for a while in a storage box and then got shuffled to the bottom of a pile it shouldn’t have been on – but thanks to my mum’s habit of writing dedications in the front of gift books I have the guilts. Sorry mum.
Anyhow, everyone else read this 18 months ago at least, so I’m behind the curve, but in case you are too, The Night Circus tells the story of Le Cirque de Rêves and some of the people who live there. The circus arrives without warning, is only open at night and is filled with enchantment and wonder. The book focuses on several characters in particular, but to say much more is to say too much. It covers decades in the lives of the key players – starting before the invention of the circus and switches backwards and forwards through time as you learn some of the secrets behind the Circus of Dreams.
I started it before those pesky nightshifts and it took my brain some time to recover so it took me longer to read than how good it is. But once my brain was functioning normally again I gobbled this up. It’s clever and it’s magical but not too far from reality in many ways. It’s romantic and intriguing and I wanted more. I suspect I’ll be going back to reread this again and that I’ll get even more from it second time.
Magic! Illusions! Kittens! Clocks! Scarves! The Night Circus has all this and more – and now it’s got me wanting some more books with magical realism. I listen to Book Riot’s Get Booked podcast and there have been several people asking for books to fill a Night Circus-shaped void in their lives, so once I’ve got the pile sorted a little bit I may have to look into that. In the meantime, I’m ransacking the existing backlog for stuff that might scratch that itch. Luckily I still have some Peter Grant saved on the shelf.
This week’s Book of the Week is Mabel Esther Allen’s Chiltern School. Regular readers will already be aware of my love of the classic school story and this one last week was a real treat for my sleepy post-nightshift brain.
Chiltern School tells the story of Rose Lesslyn – who has lived with her grandparents since her mother died and her father moved to work abroad to get away from his pain (as people frequently seemed to do in books in this era). Her father decides that she needs to go to school – much to her grandmother’s dismay – and she’s dispatched from her home on the Isle of Wight to a rather progressive (for the 1950s anyway) school in the middle of the Chiltern hills. There she struggles to fit in but eventually finds her feet, makes friends and (re)discovers a hidden talent.
Chiltern School was written in the 1950s – and sold to a publisher, but never published until Allen published it privately in the 1990s. And she was only able to do that because of the success of a reissue of another of her series – the Drina books in the 1990s. The Drina series (the subject of one of my very early posts on the blog) were written under one of her pen names – Jean Estoril. I had no idea about this until I read the forward of this book – I’d bought it because I’d really enjoyed another of her (many) other books The View Beyond My Father (about a young blind girl escaping from her domineering father in the 1910s) back in primary school days. I was thrilled to discover that my love of the Drina series in the early 90s had meant that Allen had money to do this in her old age – and that someone who’s books I’d liked so much had written so much more than I thought!
And Rose does have similarities to my beloved Drina (that series started 7 years later). Both live with their grandparents – with a stern grandmother and a kindlier grandfather, although both of Drina’s parents are dead as opposed to just one of Rose’s (there are a lot of dead parents in children’s books of this era). And trying not to give too much of the plot away here, Drina doesn’t know about her background at the start of the series but later choses to keep it secret – while Rose knows but doesn’t tell.
Both also feature the Chilterns – Drina’s ballet school has a boarding department there, where she stays in Drina Dances in Exile (the green book as it always is in my head because of it’s cover) and where she returns to several times in later books to visit friends. Now since reading Drina, I have acquired a boyfriend who comes from that part of the world – so I got an extra level of enjoyment from Chiltern School’s mentions of places that his family live or have lived and where we have been. And the area is a big feature in the book – it’s beautifully described – you can practically feel the wind rushing through your hair as Rose and her friends cycle around.
It’s not perfect – it is of it’s time and is not as diverse as you would (hope to) find a children’s book written now would be. But Allen’s writing style is charming and every readable – this is a fun romp that will make you wish you could have gone to boarding school (in the 1950s) with Rose and all her friends. That is if you couldn’t be a ballerina and be Drina…
My edition was published by Girls Gone By – who as I’m sure I’ve said before – specialise in republishing classic children’s stories that are now out of print. They do the same for my beloved Chalet School and for authors like Lorna Hill, Malcolm Saville and many more. Check out their website and see if they’ve done any of your childhood favourites.
I went straight on from this to Allen’s Ballet Family books (bought in the same spending spree back at the start of the year) which appear to have been published under Allen’s name and then reissued under the Estoril pseudonym in the 90s to capitalise on the success of Drina. I don’t know how I missed them at the time – but they are a cross between Drina and Lorna Hill’s Jane goes to the Wells – with a ballet school that’s not The Royal Ballet and a family of 4 ballet students – who’s mother is still a ballerina. And I really want to go back and reread the Drina series too.
This is a strange BotW post for me to write – as there were two other books that nearly beat The Murder Quadrille last week, and nothing that I liked as much as them this week. But I have a rule about not carrying over picks that weren’t used in a previous week. So Shawn Reilly Simmons’s Murder on the Half Shell gets the nod – but I enjoyed it more this paragraph implies. Trust me, keep reading!
Murder on the Half Shell is the second book in The Red Carpet Catering Mysteries. The plot: Penelope Sutherland runs a catering company that works on film sets, she’s on an island in Florida catering a movie – but it’s not all plain sailing. The director is difficult, the leading lady has a seafood allergy and it is hot, really hot. Then two of the waitresses she’s been using go missing after a crew party and Penelope’s former culinary school instructor turned celebrity chef is the prime suspect. But she’s sure he didn’t do it and starts to look into it herself.
Food-related cozies are such a massive trend at the moment. There’s a lot of cupcakes, bakers and coffee shops and so a catering company is a nice variant. One of the problems I often have with cozy series is that there’s a lot of murder going on in a very small area. I’m not sure how long a real cake shop/coffee shop/bakery would last if bodies kept turning up outside them and that does sometimes affect how I feel about a series as it goes on – depending obviously on how the author handles it. But the location catering idea means that there’s potential for the series to move around a bit. This of course makes it a little harder to maintain a large gang of supporting characters, but it does stop the Cabot Cove effect. The flipside is that with location moving around does it does mean that the murders might start to seem to be following the lead character around – the Jessica Fletcher effect. But there are ways and means of dealing with all of these issues – and we’ll see how Red Carpet Catering copes if the series continues.
Penelope is one of the more appealing heroines I’ve recently read in the genre too. She’s not too stupid to live (or at least not often), she’s not too obviously encroaching on police territory in a way that would get her arrested and she still manages to spend enough time at her business (or have staff manning it) that you can see that she’d stay solvent. I guess I’m trying to say that Murder on the Half Shell has a good premise, lead character and is solidly executed. I did think that some of the set-up and diversionary tactics were a little heavy-handed at times – the “obvious suspect” evidence particularly – but it wasn’t enough to annoy me. It’s not as humourous as my favourite books in the genre, but again, that’s not really a problem if the mystery is interesting – and this one is.
Murder on the Half Shell was a perfectly nice way to spend a couple of train journeys – my copy came from NetGalley and I liked it enough to go back and get the first book in the series from there too. If you fancy dipping your toe in the world of cozy crime on location, you can pick it up on Kindle (for £1.99 at time of writing).
This week’s BotW is Fidelis Morgan’s The Murder Quadrille – which is another Fahrenheit Press crime novel (that subscription I purchased is turning out to be a good move so far). Honorable mention goes to The Little Shop of Happily Ever After by Jenny Colgan – but that got a mini-review in my Half Term Reads post, so it’s not entirely left out!
This is really hard to summarise without giving the plot away, but I’m going to try. The Murder Quadrille opens at a dinner party being given by a businessman to impress his bank manager. His (really quite annoyed) wife is doing the food. Also invited is their lawyer and his trophy girlfriend and an American crime writer. Talk around the table turns to the dead body that’s turned up on the Common, but is that a good idea?
I liked this so much. It’s dark and funny and clever and you never quite know what’s happening. The narrative moves around from dinner guest to dinner guest – often jumping at just the point when you think you’ve worked out what’s happened, only to reveal another twist that you didn’t see coming. Brilliant.
This is so difficult to categorise – it’s not a detective story, but if you like cozy crime it’s not really very bloody or graphic – although it is blooming creepy – and really quite thrilling. I can’t really think of anything that’s really similar, although in the initial stages Suzette A Hill’s Francis Oughterard series came to mind – but it got much more complicated than that very quickly!
Get your copy of The Murder Quadrille from Amazon Kindle or investigate the possibility of a Fahrenheit Books Subscription here. I’ve had three books through the subscription (which I bought for myself, on the recommendation of a friend) and read two of them so far and really enjoyed both. The price has gone up since I purchased – but so has the number of books they’re publishing this year, so it’s still a saving.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 