Tag: mystery series

books, historical, mystery, series

Mystery series: Cornish Mysteries

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Happy Friday everyone, I hope you’re all having a good week and have a delightful weekend planned. Allow me to usher you towards it with a post about a 1960s-set cozy crime series!

It’s the 1960s and Eleanor Trewynn is a retired widow who is living over the charity shop she’s running in a Cornish village. Her niece Megan is a police detective who has recently transferred to the local force and now finds herself with a commanding officer who doesn’t really think female officers are a good idea. There’s an artist living next door and a cast of side characters who work in the charity shop. Eleanor and her husband lived all over the world working for a charity and this life experience means that she can handle almost anything and is used to trying to solve problems. And thus you have all the ingredients for a satisfying mystery.

As I’ve mentioned before, I really like Carola Dunn’s other mystery series – the 1920s-set Daisy Dalymple series. I don’t love these quite as much, but they have good puzzles to solve and an interesting premise and it’s nice to read a series set in the 1960s – there are lots of interwar historicals, and some immediately post war and 1950s ones, but not as many sixties ones. Yes Inspector Alleyn gets into the 1960s, but none of them are my favourites, his age is getting a bit fuzzy and Ngaio herself was in her 60s when she was writing them. There are only four of these which is a shame but I’ll take what I can get in these cases.

My copies all came from various bookshops – I read most of them when they first came out a decade ago, but the last one came out a year or two later (as you can tell by the non matching cover…) and I hadn’t seen it in the flesh (or at least I don’t remember seeing it) until I spotted it in Gower Street Waterstones the other week when I was on that little buying spree. What a fortunate circumstance. They’re also on Kindle and Kobo.

Book previews, books, new releases

Out this week: Poppy Harmon and the Shooting Star

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A bonus review today – that’s breaking some of my rules because this is the fifth in a series. But it doesn’t actually matree because this is the first in Lee Hollis’s Desert Flowers Mystery series that I’ve read. Interestingly I’ve read a couple of novellas by this author and one novel in a different series previously and wasn’t keen, but this really worked for me.

The set up is this: Poppy Harmon is a former actress who has been forced out of retired life to become a private investigator and runs a detective agency with two friends. In this instalment, one of Poppy’s former acting rivals has reappeared in her life. Serena has asked the agency to do an urgent background check on her husband to be. It seems easily done – but then Serena is found standing over a dead body holding a smoking gun and the team find themselves caught up in the investigation.

This has plenty of action, lots of twists and is really easy and fun to read. I thought I had the solution figured out – but I wasn’t entirely right and I liked that too. My copy came from NetGalley – and I even managed to read it in a timely manner! Even better, some of the earlier books in the series are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment (although not the first one) so I can go and read some more. I love it when that happens.

Enjoy!

series

Bingeable series: Fixer-Upper Mysteries

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This Friday I’m talking about a distinctly bingeable series, which has a new instalment out this week – even if my preorder hasn’t arrived yet – it’s Kate Carlisle’s Fixer-Upper mysteries.

The set up for these is a good one: Shannon Hammer is a building contractor in coastal California, having taken over her father’s business when he retired for health reasons. She’s lived in Lighthouse Cove all her life and has a group of close friends as well as family living there. There’s an old classmate from high school who is always out to make trouble for her and divide in town between the people who live there year round and the seasonal folks which adds a bit of friction on top of the regular appearance of bodies. In the first book in the series the town’s police chief is a new arrival and there’s also a crime writer who has just moved to the area as well. So there are plenty of regular characters and lots of options for the mystery plots.

I recommended the first in the series, A High End Finish, when I read it back in January, and since then I’ve read the other eight that were already published – which is the very definition of a binge! Without giving too much away, the romantic subplot in this doesn’t go the way that I was expecting/fearing from the first book, and in the later books some of the issues I had with the resolution of the first one are ironed out. Lighthouse Cove keeps developing new historic buildings or sites to facilitate plots, which is amusing but also keeps the series from feeling repetitive if you’re reading them one after another. Basically they’re fun, solidly plotted cozy crimes with a good heroine – and that’s actually harder to find that you’d think at the moment!

I think you’re going to have to order these in from the book giant – I picked up the first nine secondhand from a book group I’m in on Facebook and I preordered the latest from Amazon to complete the set.

Happy Reading!

Series I love

Series I Love: Aunty Lee

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Having mentioned the Singaporean super rich in last week’s Recommendsday, today I’m returning to the city for a mystery series and Ovidia Yu’s Aunty Lee books.

Rosie Lee is a widowed lady of a certain age, who runs a home cooking restaurant. She doesn’t need to work – her husband left her plenty of money – she does it keep her busy and because it helps her keep her finger on exactly what’s going on in the city. In the first book, two women are found dead and as she knows both of them – one has eaten at her restaurants, the other had been due to be a guest at a dinner party – she starts to investigate. This sets up both the way Aunty Lee straddles different parts of Singaporean society but also how she meets the police officer who appears through the series.

The mysteries aren’t always the most complicated – I’ve figured out the culprit fairly early more than once – but Aunty Lee’s and her world is a delightful space to spend time that it doesn’t actually matter. If you liked the world of Crazy Rich Asians, this is the cozy crime version of that except that I need to issue a warning: these books will make you hungry. The presence of food in a cozy crime series is nothing new – I mean lots of series have recipes included after all – but very few of them make your mouth water the way that Ovidia Yu’s do – even if you’re like me and you know that your chili tolerance is not enough to be able to cope with some of it! I have written about a couple of these before – there’s more about Aunty Lee in the posts about Deadly Specials and Meddling and Murder (which doesn’t seem to be attached to the series on any of the online vendors, even though it is and Aunty Lee book as you can see from the cover).

These are all available on Kindle and Kobo – and yes it really annoys me that the covers don’t match as a set – and I’ve occasionally spotted them in shops, I own one in paperback because of that!

Happy Reading!

books, mystery, series, Thriller

Mystery Series: Charlotte Holmes

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This isn’t the first time I’ve written a series post about a Sherlock Holmes related series – I think this is the third now, and that’s only the tip of the Sherlockian universe. But this time it’s a young adult series set in a New England boarding school so you can see that this might have appealed to me!

Yes I only have three of the four books!

So in the first in the series, A Study in Charlotte, we mean Jamie Watson who has just got a rugby scholarship to a Connecticut prep school. He’s not massively keen on the idea – it’s too close to his estranged father but it’s also where Charlotte Holmes goes to school. She’s a descendent of Sherlock and Jamie would has spent his whole life trying to play down (or ignore) his connection to the the famous detective’s chronicler so the last thing he needs is for the two of them to be in the same place. But after a student dies at the school, the two of them are being set up to take the fall so they start working together to find the real culprit.

There are four books in the series and the first book is the most standalone of all of them – and when I first read it I was expecting any sequels to be self contained mysteries but the other three are very much interconnected. Charlotte Holmes is a Holmes reimagined, Mary Russell is a Holmes continuation and Brittany Cavallaro is doing Holmes the new generation – in a world where Sherlock’s adventures with Watson are famous and have left a legacy (and a fortune) for his descendants.

The pace of each novel tends to start of slowly and then pick up pace as the mysteries start to hurtle towards their conclusions. The final book is a little different because it’s less thriller, more mystery but it is a satisfying end to the series. I read the first in the series when I was in the US when the first one was the only one available and read the series across a period of years as they became available which was actually slightly complicated in the UK as they didn’t become available in paperback straightaway and they are not on in Kindle in the UK. They’re still a little tricky to get hold of if you’re here but hopefully not entirely impossible.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Book of the Week, books, cozy crime

Book of the Week: Catering to Nobody

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Another week, another cozy crime pick. It feels like I’m coming off a run of romance picks onto a run of murder mystery ones. And looking at what I’ve been buying recently, this could continue for a while. Anyway, lets pack Past Verity on the back, because this is the book that I mentioned that I finished on Monday last week and nearly picked then, but restrained myself and chose The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras instead, which was clearly a smart choice, because I read another two in the series last week as well.

So, the set up: Goldy is a divorced mum of one, with an awful actually abusive ex-husband. To support herself and her son Arch after the divorce (her ex is bad at paying child support and she doesn’t want to have any more contact with him than she has to) she has started a catering company. In Catering to Nobody, Arch’s favourite teacher has been found dead and Goldy has been tasked with catering the wake. But at the event her former-father-in-law is taken violently ill and she’s accused of poisoning him. With the leftovers impounded, her kitchen shut down and her ex-husband loudly proclaiming her guilt all over town, Goldy sets out to clear her name and find out what really happened – and why.

This was published in 1990, so it’s even more vintage than the first Meg Langslow and slightly less vintage than the start of the Kinsey Milhone series (which I also love). There is something about the pre-mobile phone, pre-internet era that really just works for murder mystery plausibility. This is also set in small town Colorado and that works as well and is a bit different to California or the Eastern Seaboard states which are where a lot of the cozies I read are. Goldy is a great heroine and I really liked her friendship with her husband’s other ex-wife, Marla. I’m slightly annoyed that the cover says “Goldy Schulz Mysteries” on it – as in book one (and in fact until book four) Goldy’s surname is Bear (which inspires the name of her catering company – Goldilocks Catering, where everything is just right) so it’s giving away a bit of a plot development. But I forgive it because it’s really good – so good that I immediately read book two, and then book four because the series is so old they’re not all on Kindle and it takes a while for second hand books to arrive so I’ve given up on reading them in order for once.

The other thing that this has got going for it is that I really like the recipes. Diane Mott Davidson has included lots of them – not just baked goods but some of the other dishes that Goldy is making for the events she is catering (or just for her family) as well. There are a lot of cozy crimes with recipes and quite often, as a Brit, the recipes boggle my mind. But the books in this series that I have read so far have several that I am interested enough in to think that at some point I might try and convert the American recipes (a stick of butter? Cups of dry ingredients? How imprecise) and give them a go. Which is more than I usually think!

So, my copy of Catering to Nobody came from Kindle, but it’s also available on Kobo. Getting a paperback copy is going to be reliant on the secondhard market I think – if you’re in the US you might find it in a bookshop, but I think in the UK chances are fairly remote – the best cozy crime selection I’ve seen recently was the Waterstones Gower Street one – and they didn’t have any Diane Mott Davidson books at all.

Series I love

Series I Love: Meg Langslow

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I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get around to writing a Series I Love post about one of my favourite series, but here we are. I had planned this for December, but when I went back to read the first in the series again in preparation for this post it started the massive binge that you’ve seen evidence off in all the week in books and stats posts ever since and so this has had to wait until I finished that, because it’s only fair.

Meg Langslow is a blacksmith based in Virginia. When we meet her in book one, Murder with Peacocks, she’s living in Yorktown, but she moves to the fictional town of Caerphilly fairly early in the series where there is much more scope for Donna Andrews to create plots and drama! The first book sees Meg and her notebook that tells her when to breathe trying to organise three weddings at the same time, including her brother’s. The murder side of the book is very good, but also so is the world building which seems Andrews introduce the core of the regular characters who appear throughout the series. There is Meg’s bossy mum, her murder mystery obsessed retired doctor father, her creative but scatty brother Rob and Michael, the son of the dressmaker in charge of all the dresses. As we go through the series the regular crew gets bigger as the world expands.

There are now 32 books in the series, with a thirty third coming in summer 2023, and having reread them all basically back to back, what has impressed me is the consistency of Donna Andrews’ world building. Yes there are a few little fudges here and there, but if you weren’t binging the lot at once you wouldn’t notice them. And you don’t get fed up of the characters, or notice that there’s a formula the way you do with some other series that have run this long.

Looking back, I think that one of the smartest moves Andrews made was not marrying Meg and Michael off too quickly and then giving them a house that allowed plenty of options in terms of plot and house guests. Not every book is based in Caerphilly, but even when they are, there are enough different locations (and reasons for Meg being there) that it doesn’t feel like Meg is the problem (I’m looking at you Jessica Fletcher) or that she’s meddling unnecessarily. And because she has several different professional hats, you don’t worry how she’s stayed in business with all these bodies piling up!

Having read them all again, I think my favourites are probably Owls Well that Ends Well, Some Like It Hawk, The Nightingale Before Christmas and maybe Murder Most Fowl. But it’s hard to decide because they’re all good and it turns out they repay rereading. I’ve already written about a few of the others elsewhere as well – Terns of Endearment in the Cruise Ship post, Gone Gull was a BotW, Gift of the Magpie was in a Christmas round-up as was How the Finch Stole Christmas.

If you want to read them, the good news is that the first one is now available in ebook (it wasn’t when I started reading the series) so that is much easier to get hold of than you might expect for a 20 year old cozy crime book, but the next one after that that is on Kindle is the 9th book. Luckily, Murder with Peacocks is that rare thing – a first in series cozy crime that sets up a world very well and has a good mystery. You can find the link to the Kindle books here, the Kobo ones here and they’re also available in Apple books too. Try not to look at how much it would cost you to buy them all!

Happy Reading!

American imports, cozy crime, series

Series: Library Lovers

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This Friday it’s another cozy crime series – and another from Jenn McKinlay. I wrote about her Cupcake Bakery series about a year ago, and now we’re on the other side of the US with her Library Lovers one.

Our sleuth is Lindsey, library director in the small coastal town of Briar Creek. At the start of the start of the series she is recently arrived in town and getting to grips with her new job and the characters and rivalries at the library. As the series progresses Lindsey gets more and more established in town and develops a group of friends and love interests. Obviously there is also a murder each book – not always in the library thank goodness, because otherwise who would dare borrow a book – but some how Lindsey is always involved enough to start detecting – I mean it wouldn’t be a cozy otherwise, would it!

I’m only seven books in to the series – there are fourteen – because they’re relatively hard to get hold of over here – but so far there’s enough progression in the running strands to stop them getting repetitive (or annoying) and the murders are pretty varied too. I don’t like them as much as I like the Cupcake mysteries, but they still make for a nice comforting read when you need that sort of thing.

If you’re in the US, you should be able to get hold of them fairly easily. If you’re in the UK, it’s trickier because they’re not available on Kindle if you have a UK account. But I think I have spotted them in bookshops on occasion- and obviously Amazon have the paperbacks…

Happy Friday!

crime, series

Mystery series: Christy Kennedy

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For the first series post of the new year (yes I spent nearly two weeks looking back at 2022 and looking ahead to 2023), we’re going back in time to the late 1990s and a London-set mystery series from a time before smart phones and being able to google anything you don’t know.

Inspector Christy Kennedy is from Ireland but his patch is Camden, in North London and across the series he investigates a series of murders across his patch. He’s also involved with a local journalist ann rea (her spelling/capitalisation) who isn’t quite as convinced about the relationship as he is. The first book in the series was I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass, which sees Christy investigating a record producer who has gone missing and later turns up dead, but the second book, Last Boat to Camden Town, is actually a prequel where you see ann and Christy meet during the investigation into the death of a doctor found dead in a canal. Paul Charles worked in the music industry for years – managing bands, being an agent and programming the accoustic stage at Glastonbury, so when the books are dealing with the music industry – and they often are, see also the titles – it’s from an actual position of knowledge from someone who was there at the time and that’s the sort of detail that I love.

And it’s delightful – although a little bit disturbing – to see 90s London in a book and realise how much everything has changed. I mean I know that everything has changed over the last *gulp* 25 years, but this is definitely an era that I remember – although I wasn’t reading crime fiction at the time – so it’s weird to see how much things have changed over just a portion of my lifetime! When I first read these, it did send me on a bit of a 90s crime jag – if you were around this blog at the time you may remember me doing these and the Sam Jones mysteries around the same sort of time as each other – and I’ve since been picking up the Liz Evans’ Grace Smith series whenever I spot them too. There’s something about this sort of era that means that murder mysteries really work – maybe it’s because a lot of the stuff that’s been written now has gone super gruesome or psychological and I’m not up for that, or maybe it’s just that because it’s in the past it gives me a bit of a remove from stuff and means I can deal with it a bit more. Anyway, I love discovering old crime series that I missed – so do stick any more you can think of in the comments.

Buying this series is where it gets tricky – I read the first five of the series when Fahrenheit Press republished them nearly six years ago. I’ve since picked up the sixth, and have just ordered the seventh while I’ve been writing this and then there are another two after that that I haven’t read. I’m just going to point you at Paul Charles’s own website and the info he has there and hope that’s the best option!

Have a great weekend everyone!

series

Series reminder: TE Kinsey

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As I mentioned in the Kindle deals post – the series is on offer at the moment – and it turns out it’s because the new one is out on the 29th, so this Friday I’m taking the opportunity to remind you about the series as well as give you a quick review of the new one – as far as I’m able without spoilers!

You can get the full lowdown in my series post here from June, but the quick set up is that these are late Edwardian/early 1910s murder mystery novels featuring an eccentric widow (but not as old as you think when you see widow!) with a mysterious past and her maid who start solving mysteries after they move to the countryside and stumble upon a body. As the series goes on, extra strands get added and the core group of character widens, but they’re basically pre-World War One historical cozy crime stories.

In the new book, number nine in the series, we’ve reached 1911 and our intrepid duo are at the theatre celebrating Lady Hardcastle’s birthday when murder victim is discovered on stage at the start of the second half. Of course they’re soon investigating and trying to discover what’s going on behind the scenes of the theatre company that could have led to murder. I read it across about 24 hours and really enjoyed it – it was just the break from the day to day that I needed this week. I don’t think you need to have read the rest of the series to enjoy it, although if you have it will obviously work better for you. And as the rest of the series is on Kindle Unlimited at the moment, you can try the series in the next few days ahead of this coming out if you want to.

I got my copy from NetGalley – hence why I’m able to review it a few days before publication – but it looks like it’s going into KU when it comes out as well, so it may just be on Kindle to start with at least. And I’m never sure where this series lands in ease of getting hold of hard copy terms – there is a paperback listed of this new one, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them in the flesh. I will try and remember to check Foyles next time I’m in there though! And if you want more books set in theatres, I have a whole post of those for you too!

Have a great weekend everyone.