Tag: books

book round-ups, books

Recommendsday: February Kindle offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month so that means it’s kindle offer day and it’s a bumper crop this week.

First up, it was only was BotW a couple of weeks ago – but now Capote’s Women is 99p to coincide with the TV series that we still can’t stream over here. Not that I’m bitter about that. Also in the former BotW stakes, just from varying degrees of time ago are another few 99p deals: Ashley Poston‘s The Seven Year Slip, Annabel Monaghan’s Nora Goes off Script and Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street which is a great rich people problems novel and I think is on offer to coincide with its paperback release I think.

I read The Vanishing Half a lot longer ago than the rest, but it’s really good and stuck with me – it’s 99p too. 99p. Lissa Evans’s Old Baggage which is chronologically the first in her trilogy of related books (even if it was the last one published) is 99p and I really, really loved it.

In books I own but haven’t read (yet), Curtis Sittenfeld’s The Man of my Dreams is 99p as is Love in the Time of Serial Killers is 99p. And I already mentioned this offer, but The Breakup Tour is 99p this month, if you haven’t already had enough Taylor Swift in the aftermath of the Super Bowl (congrats Tayvis). In the related category of TV series I have watched but haven’t read the books of, Graham Norton’s Holding that the TV series was based on is 99p.

The Shadows of London, which is sixth in the Restoration mystery series about James Marwood and Cat Lovett is 99p – I’ve read this one and a couple of others in the series but with some gaps – so I can vouch for the fact you don’t need to have read all of them for it to make sense, and in fact if you don’t like on page sexual violence, you should probably avoid the first book in the series completely.

In series watch, this month’s cheap Terry Pratchetts are Night Watch at £1.99 and in his non-Discworld stuff The Long War from the Long Earth Trillogy he wrote with Stephen Baxter is 99p: The Georgette Heyer is Unknown Ajax is 99p as is the Bridgerton adjacent The Sum of All Kisses by Julia Quinn. And in Peter Wimsey it’s the second Peter and Harriet book Have His Carcase which is 99p – one of my favourites as you know, featuring the death of a dancer at a large coastal hotel. It’s actually better to read than listen to, on account of a section of code breaking that is really just a string of letters read out loud as an audiobook!

And that’s your lot – it’s a potentially expensive post depending on your reading tastes – I got off quite lightly writing it but I did also get four or five samples while I was writing this so I may yet regret saying that!

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, books, mystery, new releases

Book of the Week: Knife Skills for Beginners

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I mentioned this on release day the other week, but I really did enjoy it and the list was short last week, so here we are…

When Paul Delamare’s old friend Christian inveigles him into teaching a course at a Belgravia cookery school in his place, he doesn’t expect to end up as the prime suspect in a murder investigation. But that’s what happens when after the first night of the course a body is discovered. And of course it doesn’t help that Paul taught a knife skills class in the first day and everyone knows that chefs are short tempered don’t they? Except that Paul’s pretty sure there are some people with secrets among the people at the school and that they had much better motive and opportunity than he did. And as the course continues alongside the murder investigation, he tries to solve the crime and avoid being arrested for murder himself.

I really liked this. I was hoping it would be good and fun, and it actually exceeded my expectations. And a lot of that is because Paul is a much more interesting character than you expect from the blurb so it makes a change from the usual cozy-crime sleuths. The actual murder mystery plot is also good and plenty twisty enough for me although I’ll admit to having some doubts about the solution. This is written by a cookery writer so it has recipes as well as the murder and .I really liked them too – I know a lot of American mysteries have recipes but they’re often not ones I actually want to cook and of course the measurements are all wrong (how much butter is a stick anyone?) but with these ones I did think “oh that sounds nice”. I hope there is a sequel – there was certainly enough left hanging when it comes to Paul’s life to sustain another book with him at the centre…

My copy came from NetGalley, but as you can see from the photo it’s out in the shops now and should be fairly easy to get hold of in hard copy as well as on Kindle or Kobo.

Happy Reading!

books I want

Recommend me a series!

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A bit of a change today, because I’ve realised that I need some new series to read! I’ve finished some recently, and I’m up to date with a bunch of others, and my usual method of wandering “if you liked this, try this” type spaces doesn’t seem to be writing as well these days. If you were to order me for a reading why that is, I would say my theory is around the inclusion of TikTok sensation in so many book descriptions at the moment, which seems to be serving me a very disparate group of books, rather than getting romance suggestions from romance books and cosy crime from cosy crime. So, if you have found a a good series that you think I would enjoy binging, let me know!

Have a great weekend!

books

Books in the Wild – new stuff at last!

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After the disappointment of the airport the other week, I was in Waterstones this week and finally there are some new books starting to appear – or at least books I hadn’t seen before…

Firstly there’s a new group biography from Paula Byrne. I haven’t read much Thomas Hardy – although I have visited some of his houses – but I’ve read and liked several of her previous books like The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, Kick, and Mad World so it maybe that I end up picking this up at some point too.

The new Kiley Reid is also out now too. Such a Fun Age was such a sensation I’m interested to see how Come and Get It does – the cover is very pretty but it did strike me how different it is from that previous one.

I don’t think this is that new (last summer for the hardback I think) but it is in a time period that I’m interested in – this is about a former cinema director who travels across Europe with his family who include a member of Oswald Mosley’s party and a communist. I’ll have to do a bit more research before I read it because it has the potential to be grim as anything but I’m quite interested.

Speaking of Oswald Mosley adjacent fiction – I hadn’t realised Jessica Fellowes’ Mitford mystery series was still going, but apparently it is and this is the final one. I keep meaning to go back and give these another try, but the tbr pile is so very huge it just hasn’t happened yet…

And finally there was a big old display of the new Sarah J Maas – freshly released that day and which Gower Street had opened at midnight for which is why I mention it because it gave me such vivid flashbacks to my younger years!

Have a great weekend everyone.

books, new releases, reviews

Bonus review: A Death in Diamonds

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Instead of a series post this week – and because it came out yesterday and I read it the other week, today I’m doing a quick review of the new Her Majesty The Queen Investigates mystery – because even though it’s the fourth in the series it can absolutely be read standalone. And that’s because this time it’s entirely set in the past. It’s 1957 and the Queen is still adjusting to being in charge, and Britain is still adapting to the post war, post colonial world. Then two bodies turn up on Chelsea and there’s a connection to the household. So of course she takes an interest and tries to find out what happened. This time she’s helped by a young secretary, working at the palace after an interesting war and busy trying to deal with the ‘men in moustaches’.

I said in one of my earlier posts about this series that I wondered how this series would carry on – and maybe this is the answer – going back and doing more historical-set mysteries. Because this was pretty good. There is plenty of palace manoeuvring along side the mystery and it keeps you reading to find out what happens there as well as who did the crime. Fingers crossed there’s more where this came from.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Book previews, books

Out today: Knife Skills for Beginners

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It’s new book Thursday again and I’ve got a new murder mystery to mention. This features chef who gets roped in to teach a residential cookery course in Belgravia. But when someone ends up dead on the first night Paul needs to solve the mystery himself so he doesn’t get blamed. I’m well underway in this and I’m enjoying it so far – and Orlando Murrin is a cookery writer and chef himself so it has recipes and some of them look really good!

Book of the Week, books, new releases

Book of the Week: The Queen of Poisons

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As I mentioned yesterday, lots of rereading on last week’s list, so options for BotW were somewhat limited – and this is a bit of a rule breaker again because it’s the third in the series. But hey, what can you do.

When the mayor of Marlow drops dead in a council meeting, one of the Marlow Murder club is actually a witness. Suzie’s sitting in the gallery of the planning meeting when Geoffrey Lushington collapses. And not just that – this time the police are using Judith, Becks and Susie as civilian advisors from the start so they don’t have to guess about the details of the investigation. But the mayor seems like a nice guy – who would want to kill him?

These fit squarely into the wave of mysteries that have popped up in the wake of the success of the Thursday Murder Club. I mean it’s even got murder club in the title! But what makes the Marlow lot different is that it’s written by Robert Thorogood who is the creator of the TV series Death in Paradise and who had already written four novels based on that series before he started with Judith, Suze and Becks. I think they’re more straightforward cozy crimes than the Osman’s are, but they’re fun and easy to read and not too dark. Plus they’re set in a place that I used to know fairly well and that’s always fun.

I realise that this is more a review of the series in general than the book, but I can’t say much more about the murder plot without giving too much away (although I found the solution this time less satisfying than the previous ones) and I can’t say too much about what’s going on alongside the murder without giving too much away about the previous books in the series. But I do think you could read this without having read any of the others and not feel like you’ve missed out too much.

My copy came from NetGalley but this came out in hardback ten days or so ago and I think it’ll be fairly easy to find in the shops – the others certainly have been. And of course it’s in Kindle and Kobo. There is a TV adaptation of the first book coming soon as well so if you’re a read the books before you watch the series person, now is your chance.

Happy Reading.

book related, books

Books in the Wild: Back at Birmingham airport…

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You knew this was coming. I can’t go on holiday without trying to spot some books. We didn’t make it to a supermarket this time, so I don’t have any Spanish covers for English books this time, you’ll have to put yo with my general exasperation with the choices at the airport W H Smiths.

And it is Smiths, plural, beauty this is the best I could do from two of them – both good sized because I’m not counting the one tiny set of shelves in the one I went in before security. There are a lot of familiar suspects here I really struggled to find two books to buy – one of the reactions I ended up in two skips was because I couldn’t find what I wanted in the first one. So we have Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Lessons in Chemistry, The Thursday Murder Club and Really Good, Actually along with some crime that clearly too creepy for me!

And here we have even more creepy cover crime, more Richard Osman, a Robert Galbraith, some literary fiction and fantasy and the new Victoria Hislop.

This one is a little better, but I have In At The Deep End in the kindle backlog, the Lucy Score is in Kindle Unlimited (I even had it borrowed at the time even if I still haven’t read it), I’ve read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and the new YA Ali Hazelwood along with even more Richard Osman, literary fiction and some Colleen Hoover.

And finally, some non-fiction. They had Arnie, and Guenter from Drive to Survive, Matthew Perry, Jada Pinkett Smith and finally the book I had been looking for – David Michell’s Unruly. And if I tell you that the copy you see is the only copy there was, you’ll understand why I felt lucky to get it, even if it was a bit bumped and the spine was already broken. At which point I went back and picked up a novel I hadn’t heard of before from one of the previous shelves, but I’m not telling you which, so it can be a surprise when it pops in Books Incoming!

My conclusion from all this is that our September holiday clearly happened after all the big autumn books for the airports came out, and this one was too soon for anything else to have supplanted them. Hopefully but next holiday though…

Have a great weekend!

Book previews

Out today: Say You’ll Be My Jaan

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You all know how much I love a fake relationship romance so I had to mention that this is out today. Say You’ll be my Jaan is Naina Kumar’s debut and it’s been blurbed by former BotW authors Nisha Sharma, Linda Holmes and Sarah Adler as well as the Colleen Hoover one on the cover. This is the blurb:

Meghna has tried everything to find her jaan: blind dates, the dreaded apps, even attempting conversations with strangers. Everything except arranged marriage.

Then Seth, her best friend and the-one-who-got-away, asks her to be his “best man” and suddenly her parent’s taste doesn’t seem so bad. Which is how she meets the cranky but handsome Karthik, who knows marriage is not for him.

They’re the perfect match – if not the one their parents think they are making – and a deal is struck. They’ll announce their engagement: Karthik will be excused from his mother’s set-ups and Meghna will have a date for the wedding from her nightmares.

But how can you fake it and get away with it, when you’re not faking it at all?

Doesn’t that sound right up my street? I know. I’m looking forward to reading it!

book round-ups, books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: 50 States Mop-up

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For today’s Recommendsday I’m taking the opportunity to talk about a couple of books from last years read the USA that I hadnt got to yet!

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

This is the story of an aviatrix in the first half of the twentieth century but intercut with the story of the Hollywood actress who is playing her in a biopic. Given my reputation with award winning bond, it may not surprise you that this was a slog for the first half. It has took me literal months to read this despite having bought it on Kindle to try and get it finished because I wasn’t prepared to lug the paperback around everywhere with me. The early stages of Marion’s story are so depressing and such hard work it made it hard for me to spend too much time with it at once. But once we got to the Second World War it really came alive and I read the last couple of hundred pages in a few days and the end was more satisfying than I had feared it would be.

Wild Dances by William Lee Adams

So this one is a little unusual because I know the author. William is one of the preeminent Eurovision bloggers but also someone u work with in my day job. This is his memoir about growing up in Georgia with a profoundly disabled mother and an undiagnosed bipolar mother, and that’s only the half of it. William discovered learning as his escape and it took him to Harvard and then eventually to the UK. It is a brilliantly written and almost heartbreaking in places, but I know that because I know William I might be biased. Anyway, even though it’s sold as how Eurovision helped him, it’s actually about much more than that, and if you know him as a Eurovision figure, don’t go into this expecting lots of ESC info because it’s mostly about William and his life from childhood onwards.

When in Rome by Sarah Adams

This is another famous person and normal person romance – in this case a slightly Taylor Swift- y popstar and a small town baker. This was my first Sarah Adams and I quite liked it although it was more New Adult than I was expecting I think, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. I liked the small town vibe, I liked famous people and normal people romances (go read Nora Goes Off Script if you haven’t already, it’s wonderful) and I liked the twist of it being the heroine that’s famous and the guy that’s normal. But something just didn’t click to tip it over into great for me. Hey ho.

And there you are, three more books and we’re done. If I was going to put links to all the other books from Fiftyt States that I’ve already talked about I’ve been linking all day, so I’m just going to point you at the wrap up post which had them all there’s for you already.

Happy Reading!