Tag: kindle unlimited

bingeable series

Bingeable Series: Darling Deli

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After blitzing my way through Patti Benning’s Real Estate Rescue series earlier this year, I’ve now done the same thing with her Darling Deli series, and now I’ve made it to the end – and I think this series is completed – it’s time to talk about it.

Our heroine is Moira Darling. She’s a single mum with a just about adult daughter and owns and runs a deli in a small town near Lake Michigan. In the first book of the series the owner of one of the rival businesses in the town is found dead and Moira finds herself suspected of killing him. Over the course of the next 32 books she continues to stumble across an improbably high number of bodies and help solve the crimes, with the help of her daughter, a handsome local private investigator and an increasing group of friends. The locations expand to include a nearby town where her daughter opens her own business and the occasional trip to other parts of the country.

Like the Real Estate Rescue series, these are not the longest books, or the most complicated on the plot front. This is an earlier series, so at times the writing is a bit clunkier, but they’re basically the perfect length to read on my commute to work – which means that I don’t often read more than one in a sitting (although you’ve seen that I’ve often done more than one in a week) so you don’t notice the issues as much. The main one being that if you think too hard about how many bodies Moira is finding, and in such a short space of time, you realise that she’s a bigger curse than Jessica Fletcher and Maple Creek has a higher homicide rate than Cabot Cove! But they’re a nice easy read – and it’s not always the new character who has just been introduced who gets murdered, so that makes a change too.

These are all available in Kindle Unlimited – if you’re a KU subscriber they’re a good deal, but given their length (usually around 120 pages) I’m not sure they’re worth the non-KU price.

Have a great weekend!

Best of...

Kindle Unlimited Review of the Year

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Back when I first tried Kindle Unlimited, I promised to keep you posted on how long I kept it for and the sort of value for money I was getting out of it. I’ve not always been great at remembering to do that, but as I did last year, now we’ve finished another year, here is the lowdown on 2022.

If my Goodread shelves are correct, I read 39 books via KU last year – which doesn’t included another few that I started and then abandoned. It averages to just over a month, although some months I did more than that, and others less. The months where it got a bit patchy include when I had Covid as well as my bout of shingles and then obviously that massive Meg Langlsow binge that I’m still on! I’ve almost always got the maximum number of books on loan – as I have a bad habit of borrowing things when I see them with the intentions of reading it later and then… getting distracted!

I’ve used it to try out – and then reject in some cases – new cozy crime and historical crime series, which would have come under my rules about too hard to tell if they’re worth paying for from the sample rules, but I would have been annoyed if I’d paid for them when I got to the end! And yes I know I did pay for them if I got them in KU, but you know what I mean. On a practical financial angle, 18 of the 29 were British Library Crime Classics – which tend to retail at about £3 a book in ebook so that’s half the cost of the year of KU covered right there! And a lot of them were very good with some of them ending up as Books of the week – like Til Death Do Us Part, The Incredible Crime, Death of a Bookseller and Green for Danger – others have ended up in various Recommendsdays – including the specific BLCC one.

Aside from the BLCC masses, there are a few short stories, but almost everything else has been cozy crime or historical mystery books, which is exactly why I wanted KU to start with – mostly they don’t take me long to read, but the actual kindle price is over my maximum, or at least over the maximum that I’m prepared to pay for something I can read in an afternoon. They also help me tick of states in the 50 States challenge – although (spoiler alert) as we saw yesterday, I didn’t manage to complete it last year. But 2023 could be different…

So all in all, I reckon I’ve done ok on the KU value this year – but I need to monitor it slightly more carefully, particularly when it comes to how much the stuff I’m reading would be to buy to make sure it stays worth it.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

Christmas books, detective, Forgotten books, Recommendsday

Book of the Week: The White Priory Murders

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As you may have noticed yesterday, last week was very much a week of Meg Langslow. But I did also finish a murder mystery with Christmas in the subtitle: which is a perfect timing as everyone* starts to finish work for the holidays.

A glamorous Hollywood actress is back in London. Marcia Tate has returned to try and get her revenge on the theatre community who snubbed her before she was a star of the silver screen. But when she’s found dead in a pavilion in the grounds of the author of the play she’s due to star in, a murder investigation starts and Sir Henry Merrivale is called in to investigate. This is a variation on a locked room mystery, where snow plays a key role. There is a large cast of suspects but it seems impossible for any of them – or anyone – to have committed the crime. And yet someone did.

Every year the British Library adds another few seasonal mysteries to their Christmas collection, and this is one of this year’s additions but despite the subtitle, the snow is the only really festive element – I think A Winter Mystery would probably be a better description. Carter Dickson is one of John Dickson Carr’s other pen names, and like his other books all the clues are there for you to figure it out if you know where to look – and he’ll give you the page numbers to prove it! Dickson’s writing style is not my favourite of that group of crime writers, but it’s a clever enough impossible puzzle that I didn’t mind too much.

I got my copy via Kindle Unlimited, which means you won’t be able to get it on Kobo at the moment, but you could also buy it in paperback from the British Library bookshop – it’s too late for posting before Christmas, but you could pop in to the shop if you’re in London, and I’m sure it’ll be on the Christmas mystery table in the larger bookshops.

Happy Reading!

*everyone else – I’m still at work until Friday night, and it’s a really busy week.

Book of the Week, detective, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Til Death Do Us Part

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There were a few options for this post this week, but in the end I’ve settled on a really good locked room mystery, because those are so satisfying when done right – and this is really done right!

Dick Markham is in love (again). The object of the crime writer’s affection is Lesley Grant, a new arrival in his village. But when she accidentally shoots and injures a fortune teller at the village fete, he is told a story about her that is very different from the one that she tells about herself. Cast into confusion, he is asked to take part in a scheme to expose her as a serial poisoner – only for the person accusing her to be found murdered in exactly the way that he was told Lesley kills her victims: in an impossible locked room set up. Then Gideon Fell arrives on the scene to try and untangle the mystery.

It’s been a while since I read a locked room mystery, and this one is so clever. It is the first Gideon Fell mystery that I have read – although I read another of John Dickson Carr’s novels earlier in the year, and gave another Fell lined up already. But I can see why this one in particular has such an impressive reputation. It’s really pacy and makes you feel completely off balance as a reader because it twists and turns around so much you’re never really sure what you think – or what you’re meant to think. And I can’t really say any more about it than that because it gives too much away – even writing the plot summary was tricky! Anyway, give it a look for yourself.

My copy of Til Death Do Us Part came via my Kindle Unlimited subscription, but it’s a British Library Crime Classic, so when it cycles out of KU it should be available on all the major ebook platforms. And of course you can buy it in paperback direct from the British Library Bookshop online.

Happy Reading!

historical, mystery, series

Mystery series: Guy Harford

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Happy Friday everyone. Here I am with another Friday series post about a historical mystery series, although as there are only three books so far, it’s more of a trilogy…

So T P Fielden’s three Guy Harford books follow an artist who is reluctantly drawn into the orbit of the Royal Family during World War Two. Guy finds himself in London after an Incident in Tangier. Officially he’s employed by the Foreign Office, but in reality he’s mostly doing the bidding of Buckingham Palace. Across the course of the three books, he solves murders and travels at home and abroad as he tries to find the killers.

Now there are several series that do something similar to this – royal-adjacent Second World War mysteries – but what makes these particularly interesting is that T P Fielden is the pen name of Christopher Wilson, who is a noted royal biographer and commentator. Now admittedly most of his books focus on the more modern royals, but the serial about the household make these something a bit different. And he also wrote the 1950s-set Miss Dimont mysteries which I have also really enjoyed.

There are only three of these so far, but we haven’t yet reached the end of the war, so there may still be more. I think I got the first of these as a Kindle First Reads pick, but they’re all in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so if you’re a subscriber you can read them very easily. And if you like them, you have the option of Miss Dimont to follow on with!

Have a great weekend everyone!

book round-ups

Kindle Unlimited Review of the Year

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I promise we’re nearly at the end of the retrospective posts, but before I was finally done with 2021, I wanted to have a look at my Kindle Unlimited Membership last year and how it went. When I first tried KU, I wrote a whole post about it just before the end of my initial free trial period, and promised to check in every now and again and let you all know how it is going, and it’s been 18 months since that initial post and I haven’t. So consider this a check in.

Now obviously the first thing to say, is that I’m still a member and I’m still paying for it. I added the KU column to the monthly stats post last year, and if I’ve been tracking it right with my tags on Goodreads, I read 86 books via KU last year – which sounds like a lot. Now a reasonable number of those were short stories or novellas, mostly ones that are part of the various Amazon originals series. But where it’s been invaluable is supplying me with classic murder mysteries.

A selection of covers from BLCC books that were BotW picks

The British Library Crime Classics series rotates its titles in and out of KU as do the some of the publishers of George Bellairs and other of the other more forgotten of the Golden Age authors. This is how I’ve managed to work my way through so many Inspector Littlejohn books, but also sample new authors. And that has lead to BotW posts like The Christmas Card Crime, Murder in the Basement, The Secret of High Eldersham and Smallbone, Deceased as well as to entries in the Mini Review posts.

Then there’s the obvious help it gave me to complete my Read the USA challenge. When it came to panic stations to get it finished from November onwards, I was able to source a lot of the missing states using KU titles. Now that’s not to say that they were all good – in fact some of them I actively disliked – but the point was that I wasn’t paying money for them, aside from my KU subscription and otherwise, I would have been!

Some of the KU books that have made it into Mini Review posts

On the same front, it’s helped me sample a lot of new series – again, without spending any (extra) cash. I quite often get if you like x then try y recommendations that turn out to have books in KU. I run an Amazon wish list that’s just books that are in KU (or have previously been in KU that I’m hoping will come back around again) to help reduce decision fatigue – and also reduce the risk of impulse buying when my defenses are low!

So while I don’t think the membership is helping me reduce the physical to-read pile, I do think that I’m getting the value for the subscription. For me that is mostly coming from the ability to get the really good classic crime novels whenever I want them – so I don’t mind quite as much if some of the other stuff isn’t as good. Now I know the KU pot doesn’t work like that when it’s being distributed to authors, but there’s not a lot I can do about that, so it is what it is! But as it stands, I’m happy with the value I’m getting out of it, so it stays for a while longer at least.

Surviving the 'Rona

Surviving Coronavirus: Kindle Unlimited

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So I started a Kindle Unlimited trial at the back end of last year – the trial is about to end, so I thought now was a good time to do a little review, plus given the situation that we’re in at the moment, where people may have more time on their hands to read books but less money to spend on them, then it seemed like a good time to do a little recap. The first thing to note with this – as will any free trial – is that you need to diarise when you need to cancel your trial so that you don’t get charged if you don’t want to. I use Google Calendar for this – with a note on the actual date and a string of reminders ahead of time to make me do something. It’s also good if you have an annual subscription to something at a special rate that you want to haggle with to keep rather than pay the full price (hello New York Times). So my first point is that it’s only free if you remember to cancel it. And if you don’t cancel it, it’s only worth having if you are using it, so you need to work out a way of keeping track of what you’re reading. I’ve done this by creating a tag in Goodreads that I add to books from the service that I finish. It also really helped with writing this post!

Covers of Left-Handed Death, The Case of the Famished Parson, He Dies and Makes No Sign and The Colour of Murder

Next a quick primer for those who don’t know: how does Kindle Unlimited (KU) work? Well it’s a bit like a library – you can borrow up to ten books at a time from the included titles. And it’s super easy to know which titles are include because if you’re in the programme it’ll prioritise the option to read with Kindle Unlimited over the option to buy, and if you’re not in the programme it’ll be asking you if you want to read it for free by starting a trial. Once you’ve finished a book, you return it – and if you’re at the limit it’ll then let you borrow another one. If you belong to a library that does ebook loans via Libby this may sound familiar to you, but the difference is that the loans don’t have an expiry (you’ve got them til you give it back) and when you do give it back, it disapears from your Kindle completely – unlike libby loans which stay there and just tell you the loan has ended if you try to read it after the end of your loan.

Covers of Answer in the Negative, Murder in the Mill-Race and the Case of the Demented Spiv

So, how have I got on? So far (with about a week to go of the trial) Kindle Unlimited I’ve read 23 books and threehave them have been written about in Book of the Week posts (Murder by Matchlight – which also is about KU title Murder in the Mill Race), Answer in the Negative and Case of a Demented Spiv). I’ve also binged on a couple of series from Beth Byers – one of which I’m sure I’ll get around to writing about at some point soon. But it is a bit of a process of trial and error. Some of the stuff is really good, some of it is… less so. I’ve had a few total failures, but I’ve got better at working out from the description whether things are going to work for me or not.

Collage of my current KU titles

My perception before I tried the service was that it was mostly authors that I’d never heard over but there are some big names available – the Harry Potter books are currently in KU.  However I’ve found it’s particularly good for finding and trying forgotten Golden-Age Crime writers – as you may have noticed from the BotW. I’ve also found its handy to check back regularly to see if titles by authors you like have gone in (or out) of the programme. For example there is a different selection of George Bellairs novels available this week than there was last time I checked, there’s a  Molly Thynne novel now that wasn’t there when I checked when I returned the one I read last week. There’s a Rhys Bowen standalone novel currently available and there’s a rotating selection of British Library Crime Classics books available. I have had less sucess so far with romance and non-fiction, but perhaps that’s because I’ve read less of them using KU so far so the algorhythm isn’t suggesting the right things to me.

I still haven’t quite decided if I’m going to pay for it monthly – and if I do i’ll have to keep it under review to make sure I’m using it enough, because goodness knows I already have a lot of books to read, but I’ve enjoyed it while I’ve had it. If you’ve got KU, please put your recommendations in the comments!

Happy Reading!