Tag: completed series

historical, series, Series I love

Series Update: Emmy Lake

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Happy Friday everyone! After breaking the rules on Tuesday with my book of the week, I’m back with another later in series book for this Friday’s series post, but I have a reason for this. It’s two years since the previous book in the Emmy Lake series and book four came out last week and I have read it and I wanted to report back.

So the first thing to say is that my prediction that the fourth book would arrive in 2025 was right, and the second thing is that this series is now complete! We rejoin Emmy and the gang in 1944 and by the end of Dear Miss Lake we finally reach the end of the war. In book four, Emmy and the team at Woman’s Friend are trying to find ways to keep morale up on the Home Front as the war drags on, but also starting to think about what might happen afterwards when it’s all over. Emmy’s journalistic career continues to flourish, and her husband Charles* is finally posted back in the UK. But there are still some challenges for the team to face before Victory in Europe finally arrives.

I’ve enjoyed reading this series so much, but every one of them has made me cry at some point – and this one is no exception. And without spoilers, it wasn’t (only) happy tears about the war finally ending for everyone. There is still peril in this one and it’s not insignificant peril. But it’s a book set in wartime, so it wouldn’t feel real if no one in the core group was ever in danger. I’m probably the most avoidant I’ve been of books with potential for deaths of key characters at the moment (murder mysteries don’t count) but I enjoy this series so much that I read it in the run up to release last week (thank you NetGalley for coming through on the copy for me) because I wanted to see how it ended. I’m sad it’s over, but I enjoyed it so much, and I look forward to seeing the characters that A J Pearce creates next.

As I just said, my copy was a preview copy, but it is out now in hardback and on Kindle and Kobo. You really should read the other three books first though to get the most out of it and the good news is that I’ve seen them in in shops on the regular so if you want to read them you shouldn’t have too many issues. Side note: the Audiobook for this series is read by Anna Popplewell, who was Susan in the three Chronicles of Narnia movies that came out about a decade ago.

Have a great weekend everyone!

*yes that’s a spoiler, but it happens in book 2 so what can I do?

mystery, series

Series Update: Secret Bookcase

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So back in November last year I did a post about Ellie Alexander’s Secret Bookcase series after the release of book four, but this week the final book in the series, A Body at the Book Fair, came out and I wanted to return for a quick update. First a recap of the set up: Annie works at a specialist mystery bookshop in a small town in California, but she actually trained as a criminologist before her best friend was murdered during their final project. In each book in the series she’s solving a murder of the week, but also inching closer to solving the mystery of what happened to her friend.

Back in November, I was getting fed up with waiting for the resolution of the murder and enjoying the murders of the week more. And as the series went on on, the mysteries the books have been trying to solve seemed to get less complex because of the need to move the other story on. But until the final instalment, the books had had mostly been satisfying on one front or the other: either the murder of the week was good or the progress on the background investigation made up for it. But in book six I’m not sure either side of the story works – the mystery-of-the-week is very thin, and the background mystery felt a bit anticlimactic too, for reasons which I can’t really explain without giving you spoilers.

At the end of the final book there is a note from Ellie Alexander saying that there is a spin off series coming in 2026 called The Novel Detectives, featuring Annie and her friends. And as I still like the characters and the set up, I’m hoping that this will be much more of a the murder of the week but with developments in their personal lives as the running strand and will get back to what I liked about the earlier books. I’ll be looking out for the first one anyway and will keep you posted!