A mini bonus review for you this week as A Death in the Dark, the second book in the Novel Detectives series came out and I have read it already! This sees Annie and Fletcher investigating after the high school’s track coach comes into their offices covered in blood and claiming not to remember the previous evening. When the body of his assistant coach is found, it becomes a murder investigation and Annie and Fletcher find themselves digging into a tangled web of secrets among the staff at the high school to try and work out who the killer is. I had the murderer pegged pretty early on, but there were enough twists and turns going on to keep me guessing about whether I really was right! I like the set up and the characters, although because the series has a running story going on in the background I find that the actual murder-of-the-week is perhaps less complex than other series. However, I do want to find the answer to the long running backstory so I will definitely keep reading them!
It’s Tuesday and it’s time for another Book of the Week – and this week it’s a romance pick after a few weeks of mystery ones. And actually it could have been one of a couple of romances this week – so tomorrow’s Recommendsday has got some more of them for you. But in the meantime, my favourite book that I read last week was the new Charlotte Stein – which also came out last week. So as I said yesterday – I’m even fairly timely!
Daisy and Caleb were at college together and they’ve been enemies ever since. These days Daisy is a crisis PR specialist and her latest assignment is to try and dig Caleb out of a public relations disaster: he’s a romance author who has just told the world he doesn’t believe in romance or happy endings. She knows it’s not going to be easy to persuade him to do the book tour they’ve got planned, but she hadn’t quite realised how hard it would be. Soon Daisy’s on a road trip with him to each stop of the tour which is hard enough, but more than that people at the events are starting to think that Daisy is the mysterious woman that he dedicates all his books too – the love of his life. Soon they’re going along with the idea and now they’re also trapped in a fake relationship. Except the chemistry is starting to feel much more real than it ought to considering how much they hate each other. Because they do hate each other, don’t they?
This is the third fake relationship romance in an interconnected series from Charlotte Stein which started with When Grumpy Met Sunshine. Now my main issue (if it can be considered an issue) with that book was that it was pretty clear to you as a reader that the hero was into the heroine and it was hard to see how she didn’t see it. Now in this one it is much easier to understand why Daisy doesn’t think that Caleb is into her – she’s so beaten down by always been seen as too much that you can see how she would misinterpret or not see the signs. And as a reader it’s really quite delicious as they get stuck in these increasingly ridiculous situations being forced into ever closer proximity. And it’s so much fun – I read it in less than 24 hours and actively resented having to go to work and not carry on reading it!
In the afterward Stein says that this is the last of her rom coms – and I really hope that’s not as final as it sounds because I have really, really enjoyed reading them and I hope that she writes something similar soon. She has a small town paranormal romance series that I have my eye on for if/when prices drop because at the moment the kindle prices are too rich for my blood considering how big the to-read pile is!
My copy of While You Were Seething came via NetGalley, but as I have the other two in paperback I’m not ruling out buying myself a copy as well to give me a matching set for the bookshelves! I’ve seen the others in bookshops so I’m hoping this will be too but it’s only showing as in stock in one of the central London Waterstones at the moment so we will have to see. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too,
I’ve written a lot about Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse before, but it’s been two whole years since I last wrote a post about it, so I think it’s only fair to do this week’s new book post about the omnibus edition of the Soulless manga, which came out on Tuesday. This is exciting because the individual editions which you can see in my picture are out of print and have been for a while (I’m very glad I splurged on them back in the day) and so it means that (hopefully) it will get a bit of a new life with the omnibus.
The manga covers the first three books in the story of Alexia Tarabotti, namely Soulless, Blameless and Changeless. I would tell you where that takes you to in her story, but that would be a spoiler so all I will say is that there are two more books – Heartless* and Timeless – after this, which haven’t been turned into manga (and won’t be) but it does work as a trilogy. I’m a graphic novel reader rather than a manga one, but I really did enjoy these and I’m glad to have them on my shelf. I will also be telling the comic book store to make sure they get a copy of the omnibus because I think there will be a customer or two who would like it.
*I’m still angry that my Heartless is a different size to the rest of the series, and if I ever see a copy that is the same size as the others I will be buying it so I can shelve them in order by chronology not by size because you can see from my photo what an absolute mess it is.
A bit left field for this week’s new book because Alan Bennett is a legend. This officially comes out today, but the copy I pre-ordered for my little sister arrived on Tuesday. So you may already have your copy too. Enough Said is the fourth volume of Bennett’s diaries, taking you from 2016 – 2024 when Alan turned 90. He will be 92 in May and so every new thing at this point is a blessing and a treat. A Question of Attribution was on TV over Christmas, and I’m waiting for The Choral to pop up on a streaming service so I can catch up on that too.
It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it is time for the Quick Reviews, which this month has turned out to be a reporting back in special – with reviews of three books that I mentioned when they were released and which I’ve now read. You’re welcome.
The Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone*
As I said on release day this is set in a college town and features a new arrival to the the town who takes on a nannying job alongside her work at the college only to discover that her new boss is the guy she had a one night stand with on her first night in town. Once again with these two authors’ joint works, I like the premise and some of the execution but not all of it. It’s got fun banter, it navigated the power dynamic issues of boss-nanny really well (much better than I expected) but I found the plot strand about Maddie’s longer term career aspirations frustrating and I thought it was one plot strand too many. Also this had a couple of my personal bug bear words during sex scenes (please, no seeping) which was annoying.
Night Rider by Sloane Fletcher*
Now I had my doubts about the signals the cover was sending when I wrote my preview post for this and I was right: this has got the wrong cover. Because this is definitely a romantic suspense and the cover doesn’t really indicate that. It’s in the blurb to some extent, but this is a much darker read than a pink and lilac cover would have you think. There are various points of not insignificant peril and a heroine who is suffering the after effects of trauma. There is a lot of cowboy ranch action here, but it is broken up by the darkness and peril. There is possibly a bit too much plot going on here too and I felt like it left the readers hanging a bit as well – it felt like there should have been an epilogue to wrap up one key plot strand completely – or a preview explaining that it would be tied up in the next book in the series. Sorry if that doesn’t make sense, but any more would be a spoiler.
Missing in Soho by Holly Stars*
This is the second book featuring the drag queen and sometime detective Misty Divine. Now as I said in the preview, I was coming back to see how the huge hanging thread from the first book was resolved. And the good news is that that thread was resolved in this one (more or less) but some of the things that I didn’t love in the first book were even more prominent in this one. Misty/Joe in that first story was a bit too-stupid-to-live and foolhardy at times in that – but this one it felt like their behaviour has properly crossed over into selfishness – which is what a lot of the other characters were accusing them of. I did understand Misty/Joe’s motivations but it made them a very hard character to like – and I think the whole point is that you’re meant to be rooting for them. Other people may not have that issue or be bothered by it in the same way that I was though. The end of the book teases a third in the series, but I’m not sure I’ll be reading it.
Happy Tuesday everyone, and I’m back with a new release (well it was released in February and I read it in February so that counts as new release) romance for this week’s Book of the Week.
The heroine of Love and Other Brain Experiments is Frances, a neuroscientist who has spent the last five years trying to build her career after turning down a job – and her boyfriend – to follow her own research. Now she’s heading back to New York to a conference, where she’s going to come face to face with that same ex, who said she’d never make it on her own. When an argument with a rival is mistaken for an argument between a couple, she’s flustered and inadvertently confirms the misconception and suddenly both her and Lewis’s careers are at risk – and thus starts the fake dating agreement…
My favourite Sophie Kinsella book is Can You Keep a Secret, which starts with a genius scene set on a plane, and this also starts with an excellent plane-based meeting which set me up to really enjoy this. I had a slight concern with the fake dating scenario – because as the book sets it out Frances’s main problem with the initial relationship misconception is gaining a reputation for untruthfulness in science (where falsifying data is the worst thing you can do) but then she and Lewis create a much bigger reputational risk with the prolonged fake dating scenario. However, I love a fake dating story, and an enemies to lovers plot and this is so much fun that I just decided to go with it and hope that the resolution was well thought out and satisfying enough to negate that fear – and it basically was.
Frances is a great character – I loved all the details about the different places she’d worked in around the world and her complete single minded focus on her research made a great foil for her missing some issues in her real life outside of the lab. I thought Lewis was also really well drawn, although the reason why he and Frances became rivals seemed pretty unsurmountable initially, the actual explanation made it work. There is a slight case of just have a proper conversation you two here, but ultimately I raced through this in about 36 hours and ended with a big smile on my face at the resolution. This is Hannah Brohm’s debut – and this is a really accomplished start to a romance writing career and I look forward to seeing what she writes next. And on a more basic level this was one of the first STEM romances that I’ve read recently that wasn’t completely obviously a Reylo thing…
I got my copy of Love and Other Brain Experiments from NetGalley, but it’s out now in Kindle, Kobo and paperback – and as you can see I’ve already found it in a Waterstones – so it should be fairly easy to find in the shops too.
The latest Library Lovers book, Booking for Trouble, came out in hardback in the US on Tuesday, This is the sixteenth in Jenn McKinlay’s series about Lindsay Norris, a library director in Briar Creek, Connecticut, and sees Lindsay getting involved in a murder after heading out on a book boat to some of the islands in her library’s patch, inspired by bookmobiles (or mobile libraries as we have here I guess?) that she’s seen in other areas.
But this also is my chance to talk about the demise of the mass market paperback in the US. These aren’t available on Kindle in the UK, so I’ve been buying in the paperbacks for years from the US. There are a couple of series like this, where I rely on these smaller than average (and cheaper than average!) paperback copies to get my fix. But sales have been dropping, and more and more books have switched to the larger and more expensive trade paperback format. Various people have been writing about it, but here’s the New York Time’s article from the start of the month, and Publisher’s Weekly’s from December. As a voracious and speedy reader, the price point and convenience of mass markets – especially secondhand – has been a boon for my reading – particularly in my early days of romance reading when the likes of Eloisa James and Sarah MacLean weren’t always getting UK releases. There are series that I want to finish – or continue reading – where I definitely can’t justify the hardback price for them. And given my love of matching sets, a size change is definitely not what I want either! This is one of a number of series where I’m going to have decisions to make as the next books come out.
We were in Birmingham last weekend, so of course I took a trip to the Big Waterstones to see what they had that was new or out of the ordinary.
But I’m going to start with the Buy One Get One Half Price table – because as you can see Murder on Line One is now in paperback but also because I wanted to ask if any of you have read Murder at the Black Cat Cafe because I keep seeing it in shops, picking up and reading the back and thinking it might be too scary for me because Japanese murder mysteries tend to be too scary for me even if in this case the author is being compared to Agatha Christie – because they also do that for the author of Murder at Mt. Fuji! Anyone able to help?
And now on to the stuff I hadn’t see elsewhere (but that is also too scary for me) a new thriller translated from Korean about a K-Pop idol who is kidnapped by a small group of his biggest. I think this for having a cover that clearly indicates that it is too scary for me, but I wish I wasn’t as terrible with scary books because this sounds like a really clever concept. And K-pop is huge at the moment so hopefully it will do well and I continue to be thrilled to see more books in translation making it to the front of bookshops, rather than just in a special section of the big university bookshops.
Lets move on to something I might actually read, and another new release: Zofia Nowak’s Book of Superior Dectecting by Piotr Cieplak. This came out at the end of January and is about a Polish woman who comes to London after her son disappears to try and find out what has happened to him. Zofia thinks it’s something to do with a writer called Steve and takes on jobs as a cleaner to try and fund her DIY investigation. This sounds really interesting – and the blurb promises laughter as well as a puzzle to solve so if I can just get the to-read pile down, I will try and get to it.
And finally we have the table of Heated Rivalry books – including the first one Game Changer which was on offer at half price and which I bought and had a lovely conversation with the cashier about them and the TV series. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to see a romance book doing well.
With the skating over and the Winter Olympics coming to a close, I’m keeping the winter sport tangent going on for ever so slightly longer with a trilogy of romance novels set around a ski resort. Slightly tenuous, but I’m going with it and you can’t stop me!
This three novels are interconnected but not really interdependent (the last one is the question mark) romances set in the ski resort of Bluebird Basin. Come As You Are which was a BotW in 2023 and was about Madison the ex-rockstar and sober living home owner and Ashley who is fighting to keep control of her family’s ski hill. She’s in her mid 40s, he’s around a decade older and they both have baggage to overcome before they can get to their happily ever after. The second book is Lips Like Sugar which is about Mad’s bandmate Cole and Ashley’s best friend Mira who end up fake dating at Ashley and Madigan’s wedding because of Mira’s awful ex. But the fake date is the start of a real connection between the two of them even after Cole has headed back to Seattle.
And finally Wish You Were is the only one I haven’t written about here beforeand is the story of Kevin and Davis, who were a couple until Kevin relapsed into drug addiction. He’s back from rehab and wants to win Davis back, but she really doesn’t know if she can trust Kev again. And the resort is so small they can’t exactly never see each other. There are themes of addiction and recovery running through the first two stories but this one has addiction and recovery much more front and centre than those two did, which is a bit less in my regular reading wheelhouse. Like the others in the series this is a second chance romance, but this time the protagonists are a lot younger, and they are looking for their second chance after Kev’s relapse into drug addiction. It’s still really well written, and it’s really emotional and builds to a satisfying resolution but I think it was a bit too high on the angst scale for me at the time that I was reading it (and to be fair, I don’t think I’ve got any more emotionally resilient since, if anything the opposite). But if you do like that, I think it’s really going to work for you. But the first two with the older protagonists were much more my thing – they’re not quite the same as the Cathy Yardley older protagonist romances that I’ve loved, but they’re not too-too far away from that.
These are all in Kindle Unlimited at the moment- along with Jess K Hardy’s two space-set romances, which I haven’t read (yet).
I may not have read much last week (Winter Olympics!!!) but at least one of the books I did read – and also really enjoyed – is out today so once again I’m managing to be timely. Even if it is a sort of accident.
In 1920s Montreal, Agnes is looking for a new home for her cat shelter. The previous one is collateral damage in a fight between two magicians so they can’t stay there, but no one is keen to rent a shop to a charity dedicated to rescuing street cats. And that is how the shelter ends up being a front for a mysterious magic shop. As the cats make themselves at home upstairs, downstairs Havelock Renard, the world’s most famous magician and possible Dark Lord is selling magic from the basement. Agnes isn’t happy about being connected with magic – she’s dedicated to the cats – but when one of Havelock’s enemies starts threatening him, she’s drawn into the world of the magicians and may end up having to help Havelock in order to save the world.
The first thing to say about this, is that this is incredibly Howl’s Moving Castle coded – but with more romance. And given that the thing I wanted from the movie of Howl was more romance, that was exactly my jam. Yes, it’s also looking at loss and grief, but it’s got a grumpy, misunderstood magician and an efficient non-magical person who isn’t taking any of his nonsense. I really loved the world building and the way that it was woven into the story and revealed as the plot unfolded rather than info-dumped on the reader, and the denouement at the end was so moving that I ended up crying on a train, which hasn’t happened in a very long time! I could absolutely have spent another 100 pages in the world at the end – and if there’s a sequel I will be first in line!
I’ve used the UK cover for the image at the top, because that’s what you’ll see in the shops, although I have to say that I’m not sure I would have picked it up in a shop if I’d seen it although I can’t quite put my finger on why. The version that I got from Netgalley had the US cover – which I’ve included a screenshot of below – because it’s so pretty but it’s also so 1920s and such a different vibe. Anyway. I have learned my lesson and I will be off to have a look at Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series which I’ve seen around but haven’t really picked up.
My copy came from NetGalley as I mentioned, but this is out today in hardback, Kindle and Kobo. I’ll be checking the shops for it so I will report back if/when I see it about how likely it is for you to be able to find this one in the wild. Also, while I have your attention. Hattie Brings the House Down, which is the first book featuring Hattie from Hattie Steals the Show (one of my favourite new books last year) is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment – so if you haven’t managed to read any either of those yet, this may be your chance!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 