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.
It’s Friday again and I’m back with only my second post about a mystery series this year.
This is a small town cozy crime series with a literary twist – there are six books in the series and I’ve read five of them. At the start of the series, in A Dark and Stormy Murder (which was a BotW back in the autumn of 2024) Lena London is an aspiring suspense author who moves to Blue Lake in Indiana because she’s just landed her dream job as assistant to her favourite author Camilla Graham who is based there. As it’s a mystery series bodies start to turn up and there are love interests and the first book also sets up a running back story mystery that needs solving involving a secondary character.
Unlike a lot of mystery series, Lena actually choses between her love interests pretty early and the running mystery isn’t dragged out too long either. Julia Buckley introduces new regulars as the series goes on too which helps broaden the world and introduce new avenues for corpses to appear – although the same person is the prime suspect in the first three mysteries for reasons related to the running side plot. Blue Lake is a nice setting and Lena’s status as a new arrival, albeit from not far away and with a friend living in the town, means that you get explanations of who is who and what is what pretty naturally in the narrative, which isn’t always the case.
The fifth book did feel like a bit of a shift from the other four with a missing person and a (possibly) evil corporation coming to town rather than a body and I didn’t like it as much. I think the series probably did need to do something a little bit different but the direction of the plot felt a bit confused and like the book couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to move towards a more cozy thriller type thing. Number six (aka the one I haven’t read) has a different cover style and is significantly more expensive and isn’t linked to the previous five on Amazon so I suspect that it may be a different publisher, which maybe suggests that the previous one didn’t work as well for other people two.
That said the first four books in this series are good, well plotted mystery stories with a nice setting and a good cast of characters and are worth a look if you see them around. Unlike a lot of the cozy series I read these are available as ebooks on Kindle and Kobo, and I’ve picked up a couple of these from the Big Waterstones in Picadilly, so they’re easier to find than some of the mass market series I read.
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!
It’s only a couple of weeks since I did a recommendsday post of First books in mystery series, and here I am today back with a BotW post for another first book in a cozy mystery series. Who could have predicted it…
In Buried in a Good Book, thriller writer Tess has taken her daughter to spend the summer at her grandfather’s cabin in the woods. Tess is telling Gertie that it’s because a summer without wifi will do them both good, but really she’s trying to take Gertie’s mind off the fact that her father, Tess’s ex-husband hasn’t been in contact with Gertie for months. But soon after they arrive, there’s an explosion and fish guts start raining down on them but also a human arm. Tess is suddenly part of a real life murder mystery, rather than writing one – and the detective investigating is the spitting image of the hero of her books, a fact he’s not best pleased about.
This was my first book by Tamara Berry and it was a really nice read for a winter weekend. The mystery is more complicated than you expect and it’s got a nice sense of humour about it too – Tess can’t turn her writer brain off and she knows it’s ridiculous to be caught up in a real life murder and that she’s not helping herself. I read a couple of books last week where the amateur sleuth really wound me up, but Tess was such a great break from that. I liked the group of secondary characters that were being set up too – and the small town setting has enough detail that it doesn’t feel like a cliche. I was really pleased to see that there are already a couple more in the series and I may already have acquired book two…
I read this on Kindle, but it’s also available on Kobo (although more expensive than Kindle) and in paperback with a different cover and at a frankly ridiculous price on Amazon at time of writing although it reckons there is only one copy next so who knows.
It’s the middle of the week again and I’m back with some more murder mysteries, but this time they’re the first books in their series.
Grime and Punishment by Jill Churchill
After picking up two later books in this series earlier this year, I’m now going back and getting more and have acquired the first one. Book two, Farewell to Yarns was a BotW in May, but in Grime and Punishment Jane is trying to solve the murder of a cleaning lady in the house next door because the suspects include a lot of her friends. Often in a first in a series there is too much set up and the book can suffer, either from just having too much going on or from the mystery not being quite good enough. This isn’t one of those – it manages to introduce the group and Jane very naturally and the mystery is sufficiently twisty.
Murder on the Mountain by Ellie Alexander
After having enjoyed Alexander’s Secret Bookcase series, I was interested to read this first one in a different series from her – a re-release and retitle of something she had previously released under a different pseudonym. Our heroine is Meg, a journalist who scores a job at an outdoors magazine, where she’s definitely trying to fake it till she makes it because her outdoor skills are practically nil. The murder in this one is of a contestant in an outdoor competition TV show, but in the background is the death of Meg’s father (an investigative journalist) in mysterious circumstances while working on an expose. I didn’t love this – I found Meg a real trial because she is almost aggressively clueless about the outdoors, and about a few other things in the story. However as these are in Kindle Unlimited, I’ll probably give the second one a go to see if it improves any once all the series set up is over with. However, given this was Alexander’s first ever series, and I don’t know how much reworking of it she’s done, it may just be that Alexanders writing has changed since she wrote these!
Beaches, Bungalows and Burglaries by Tonya Kappes
Mae West’s (no, not that one) life has taken a turn – her much older husband has turned out to be a conman, he’s in jail, she’s divorced him and all his assets have been seized. So instead of a life of luxury, she’s got to start over and all she has is am RV and campground in Normal, Kentucky which her husband put in her name years ago. So she heads to Normal to start over, but finds that the community there is suffering because of her husband too. Then he turns up – not in prison, but dead in the lake at the campsite and suddenly she’s a suspect. I found this while I was looking for books for my missing states for the 50 states challenge this year, and didn’t realise that I’d read one of Kappes’ series years ago when she was being published by Henery press back when they were in a really good groove of easy, fun cozy crime. And this is slightly ridiculous (and the recipes at the end are awful) but it’s a pretty fun read, with a good set up for a series. If you’re a KU member, it’s worth a read, but I have no idea how Kappes has get this set up going for *checks* more than 40 books! I suspect that I’ll read a few more to see because long series are so hard to pull off!
As I said yesterday, most of my reading last week was to contribute to this year’s fifty states challenge and this was one of them. It’s slightly rule breaking but I’m going with it.
Buffalo West Wing is the fourth in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef mystery series featuring Olivia Paras, who (as the title suggests) is the executive chef at the White House. In this, a new president has just been elected and that means big changes for the staff at the Residence. It also means Olivia needs to impress the new President and his family, but when some mystery chicken wings turn up in her kitchen, she gets off on the wrong foot with them because refuses to serve them to the First Kids. But when the people who do eat them fall ill, she’s caught up in a plot to threaten the First Family.
This is the first in this series that I’ve read (or even come across) and it had slightly more peril than I was expecting and also a lot of pre existing relationships to get my head around. But there was info there (and not in info dumps) that it made sense and I really enjoyed it. I would happily read more of the series.
I read this one in paperback as you can seem but as it’s nearly 15 years old (and the series has been dormant since 2016) they may not be that easy to find in physical copies. In fact I’m amazed I found this one in Waterstones a couple of months ago. But they are all available on Kindle and Kobo.
Happy Friday everyone, and today I’m back with a post about a slightly unconventional mystery series – the Shady Hollow books by Juneau Black because book six, Mockingbird Court, came out on Tuesday.
This is a cozy crime series with a difference – it’s set in a small town with all the usual small businesses and our detective is a newcomer to the town who has just started a job as a reporter at the local paper. But the difference is that everyone in the town is a woodland creature – Vera Vixen the reporter is a fox, police deputy Orville Braun is a bear, there’s a Owl who runs the bookshop, a panda who runs a restaurant. You get the idea and if you think about it too much, none of it makes sense. But as someone who grew up playing with Sylvanian Families toys, I can totally get on board with it.
Apart from the whole talking animals thing, they follow the cozy crime series pattern in a fairly standard way – each book has a different murder, there’s a running story line with a romance for Vera and there are friendships and tensions in the community that develop as the series goes on. Juneau Black (who is a pen name for a duo of authors) have created a of belief system for the animals that plays a role in their lives and creates events for the animals to focus on – and for murders to occur at. And like so many non animal cozy crimes, being a reporter gives Vera a reason to be digging into crimes and – spoiler alert – dating a police officer provides her with more details than she could get alone creates tension when it needs to when she’s butting up against the officials.
The new book is Mockingbird Court and is set in the run up to the town’s Harvest Festival. According to the blurb, a famous author who is suspected of murder back in the big city sneaks into town, claiming to be innocent. Vera starts investigating, but finds that she may even be implicated herself. I’ve enjoyed reading the five previous books in the series and I’m looking forward to reading this one when the Kindle price drops to something sensible!
These are available on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback, although I’ve never seen the paperbacks in the shops in the UK but that might be different in the US
The TV adaptation of Reverend Richard Coles’ first novel in the Daniel Clement series arrives on TV soon so I thought now was a good time to write a series post about them, although I’ve already written a few bits about them in other posts.
Lets start with a reminder of the set up: It’s the late 1980s and Daniel Clement is Canon of the parish of Champton, a seemingly quiet and sleepy village (albeit a fairly large village judging by the number of shops it has!) where secrets are hiding below the surface. Murder Before Evensong sees battle lines being drawn in the village over a proposal for a lavatory in the church. You wouldn’t think that could lead to murder, but when it comes to parish rivalries, anything is possible! Trust me, I’ve seen things. One of the things that I like about the books is the fact that I can recognise a lot of the processes and ceremonies of the church as very similar to the ones that were happening in the parish church that I went to as a child.
There are four books and a Christmas novella in the series now and so far Coles has managed to find different places and set ups to put Daniel in so that Champton doesn’t quite feel like the St Mary Mead or Cabot Cove of the Midlands. So in book two he’s in a neighbouring parish that is being merged with Champton. In book three he’s taken a sabbatical from his day job to go back to the monastery where he trained and in book four there’s a movie crew filming at Champton House.
As you can see from the trailer above, the adaptation has Matthew Lewis aka Neville Longbottom as Daniel and Amanda Redman as his mother Audrey. It’s going out on Channel Five, which means it could go either way for me: I really liked the first couple of series of their All Creatures Great and Small adaptation, but I haven’t had a lot of luck with their other mystery series. But I remain hopeful and I may yet report back…
It’s been more than a month since I picked a murder mystery for book of the week. Can you believe it? I can’t – and even when I went back and checked I still sort of didn’t believe it. But it’s true, so who says there’s no variety in my reading. And there’s more murder mysteries coming tomorrow in the Quick Reviews, but first let’s talk about The Last Supper.
Prudence Bulstrode is a retired TV chef. But when one of her former rivals is found dead in the garden of a house where she was catering a shooting weekend, Prudence is called in to replace her. Farleigh Manor is notorious for an unsolved murder from a century ago, but when Prudence arrives she is soon convinced that Deirdre’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but murder. And while her granddaughter, who she brought along to keep her out of getting into (even more) trouble starts investigating the old murder, Prudence sets out to solve the new one.
Rosemary Shrager is a chef who has been a semi regular on British TV for about 20 years now and before that she ran her own catering company, so the setting for this falls very much into her area of expertise and it shows. I personally have never been on a shooting weekend, but it very much felt like she had and all is those details really worked. I also found this quite humorous – with the tension and generation gap between Prudence and Suki, but couldn’t work whether that was deliberate or not. But does it matter if it was or wasn’t? The only disappointment to me was the eventual solution to the murder, which without giving spoilers about what precisely happened, I didn’t quite feel like the reader had all of the pieces for it to work as well as I wanted it to.
But it was a fun read that I finished in an afternoon and evening and I will definitely keep an eye out for the sequel (there are two now) to see if the humour was deliberate!
I bought my copy of The Last Supper secondhand and I’ve seen it in the shops fairly regularly. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
A slightly strange week of reading last week due to the trip, so it’s been a strange one to pick something today, but in the end I did come up with something!
Next Stop, Murder is set in a town in the Adirondack Mountains. Celia has moved to Blue Lake with her daughter Katie after a tragedy in New York. Celia’s taken over an ice cream shop, which is a big change from her previous life as a NYPD forensics expert. But when a body is found on a tour bus, Celia finds herself drawn into the investigation.
This did feel very much like a first book in series because there’s a lot of set up work being done alongside the murder plot. It’s got an interesting narrative style though, with the narration moving around as well as diary entries from Katie, and articles from the local press. The mystery isn’t that complicated, but it worked well and I enjoyed the book enough that I’ll be checking out the second in the series to see if those first-book symptoms have cleared up.
This one is in Kindle Unlimited, so it’s not on Kobo (at the moment at least) and I suspect the paperback that’s listed on Amazon is a print on demand one, so I wouldn’t expect it to be in the shops. But if you’re in KU at the moment it’s an easy way to pass a couple of hours.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 