Take A Chance, Sasha Sinclair has filmmaker Sasha trying to make the documentary film her late parents dreamed of – about the life of Alice Bishop. Alice’s descendant Margot doesn’t want to be making the film, even though her family’s businesses really need the boost it could give them, but as she spends more time with Sasha… I know it’s the first of the month today and so it probably should be the stats post, but given that the first in this series, Dream On, Ramona Riley, was BotW back in June when I mentioned that a third book was on the way, it’s only fair that I circle back around today and say that this came out on Tuesday. I’m looking forward to reading this when I can get my hands on it – maybe this is the excuse I need to head to a romance bookshop or Gay’s the Word in the near future?
Happy Tuesday everyone. After last week’s Japanese fiction Recommendsday it just so happens that I’ve got another Japanese novel in translation today – it’s actually a new release in English and it’s got a very different feel from the ones I mentioned last week…
Yoshitaro Katayama is not an ideal candidate to be a detective: he doesn’t like heights, he’s socially awkward and he’d rather not come into contact with dead bodies. But his father was detective and it was his dying wish for his son. And so here he is. One morning he’s offer the choice of looking at some gruesome crime scene photos of a murdered young woman or going to the college she was a student at to conduct investigations. He chooses the latter, but soon there are more bodies and he has acquired a cat which belonged to one of the victims. He’s not keen on having a pet, until she starts to show an unusual level of interest in the case…
Now I know there are a lot of cozy mysteries with cats (often talking cats) in them. This is not one of those. Katayama also has a sister that he lives with and worries a lot about, and an auntie who is trying to arrange him a marriage but this is not cozy. Do not be deceived. This is a serial killer mystery which happens to have a cat. The detective is a bit hapless but the crimes he is investigating are anything but.
This originally came out in the late 1970s and is the first in a long running series by Jiro Akagawa that has only just making it into English. Considering their age they felt surprisingly current – obviously there are no mobile phones or computers but apart from that they could have been now. Of course that could be down to the choices Haydn Trowell has made in the translation. The murders were a bit on the gruesome side for what I’m used to reading, but I am interested enough in what happens to detective Katayama next that I may pick up the next one when it comes out in a few months time.
My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out today in Kindle and Kobo and all the usual formats. I have no sense of how easy (or otherwise) this will be to get in hard copy, but it’s got physical copies listed so it may be possible
At this point my love of Jen DeLuca and especially of her Willow Creek/Rennaissance Faire series is well known, so this post should not be a shock to you. A fifth (and final) book in the series has arrived and taking us back full circle to where we started, our heroine this time is Caitlin, who was the teenage instigator of Emily’s involvement in the Renn Faire in Well Met, the daughter of April, the heroine of Well Matched. In Well Versed, Caitlin is now 24 and back at the faire for the summer because she’s unemployed and back at home. This is a second chance romance – because our hero is Alex, who is the reason she fell out of love with the faire when he broke her heart years ago. I am so here for this and I can’t wait to read it!
In the Miss Marple series post earlier in the month, I mentioned that there is a new Miss Marple continuation novel. It’s already out in the US but it comes out on Tuesday coming in the UK so this week I’ve got a bonus review for it because I’ve already read it.
Miss Marple and her friend Dolly Bantry are on holiday at a resort high in the Swiss Alps. Along with a companion to smooth the way for them, they are enjoying the mountain air and watching other people doing winter sports. Among the other guests at the hotel are a politician and his young wife, a blonde bombshell who may be nearing her expiration date for the movie industry and a couple of suspicious characters. When one of the guests at the hotel is found dead in an empty gondola at the top of the ski slopes, Miss Marple can’t help but start trying to work out what happened. In the chronology of the series, this comes sometime after Arthur Bantry has died, but definitely before Caribbean Mystery and I’m going to say also before The Mirror Crack’d* because if it had been after there would definitely have been mention of Marina Gregg in the face of another movie actress.
This is a really interesting continuation to write about because I think that the characters are very true to the original series but the actual writing style and elements of the plot are very different. This is told from multiple points of view and elements that are definitely closer to thrillers, including with action elements. I haven’t read any of Foley’s other novels but I’m assuming that this is her style in them – but with Agatha Christie’s characters. And I enjoyed it and thought that it worked.
I’ve been puzzling about why I liked this and didn’t like the Sophie Irwin Georgette Heyer novel and I think the difference is that Irwin has taking someone else’s characters and writing about them in her own style but they are behaving in a consistent style with what the reader would expect from them, whereas Irwin has tried to add Heyer-esque language into a book with characters and a plot of her own creation. Which I guess you could say is because Heyer didn’t repeat characters and Christie did, but recreating someone else’s characters and making them seem consistent is not easy. Jill Paton Walsh did it with her Wimsey continuations, but she had the skeleton of a novel started by Sayers to help her with the first one and although I didn’t like all of the the later developments in that series, the characters always felt true to the originals. But not all of the authors who contributed to the Miss Marple short story continuation the other year managed it for sure. So that’s a significant achievement for me.
I don’t think everyone is going to like this, but I definitely think it’s a better choice than trying to recreate Christie’s style which could feel too much like a pastiche. Presumably the choice of Foley to write it was to achieve that – following with what Sophie Hannah has done in the Poirot continuations.
This is going to be absolutely everywhere when it comes out next week and you’re going to have no trouble finding it I think the timing of it being two weeks after the new Richard Osman was definitely a deliberate choice because I think it’s going to sell to the same sort of audience – people who are looking for a known quantity to read whether it’s to read on (an autumn) holiday or as a gift book this Christmas.
Happy Reading!
*Interestingly it also references Sleeping Murder which although it was released last, it was written a long way before that and omits some of the later developments as I mentioned in the other post and I totally agree with that choice
I’m actually following up on a new release I mentioned a couple of weeks back for this week’s pick, because it really lived up to the promise of the blurb and the gorgeous cover and was a really great read.
At the start of the book Philippa is cycling to work as a university professor when she narrowly misses falling into a sinkhole as it opens up. This near miss gives her a wake up call and suddenly she doesn’t want to put up with the frustrations of her academic job any more – whether it’s the office that’s actually a cupboard or the (male) colleagues who seem to only value her for the fact they can force her to do the jobs they don’t want to. So she hands in her notice and throws her life in to chaos. Luckily she inherited her romance-author grandmother’s house (and boat) and so she moves back there to regroup. Unluckily the house is in need of some serious repair and also comes with a sitting tenant – her grandmother’s former co-writer (and cover model). As Philippa and Dylan start to navigate their awkward co-habitation situation they also get to know each other and eventually find outlines for six more novels in Philippa’s grandmothers fantasy pirate romance series, which they start to write together. But can Philippa actually find a new future outside of academia?
This has a really good slow burn romance with two characters who have a lot of issues to work through, but because Philippa has the backstop of selling the house (which is on prime ocean front land) the stakes are lower than you might expect. She does have the most awful parents that I have recently encountered in literature and I really, really wanted them to get a lot of comeuppance (more than they did get, I’m warning you). But Philippa and Dylan’s slow dance towards each other is worth putting up with the rage that her mother will generate in you (her siblings are better than her parents, mostly, but that’s not saying much). Philippa’s disillusionment with academia felt very real – as did her difficulty in letting go of her plan for her life and figuring out a new one. I think that’s very relatable for millennials especially, who graduated into the financial crisis of 2008 and feel like they’ve been trying to make their lives more secure ever since then.
And as a romance reader, I loved that Philippa’s grandmother was a romance author of the old school type and that romance novels were the answer to Philippa figuring herself out and finding love. This is a warm hug of a novel – well except for the leaking roof, and bracing sea breezes – and would make a great autumnal read as you curl up on a sofa and hide from the changing seasons. I haven’t read any of Jacqueline Firkins’ other books but I’m pretty sure I have at least one of them on the TBR so you may see that popping up on the weekly list soon too!
My copy came from NetGalley but it was an Amazon First Reads pick in August before it came out at the start of September and is now in Kindle Unlimited so if you’re in that you can get it. That does mean it’s not on Kobo at the moment, and I also don’t have much of a sense of how easy it might be to find in the shops but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.
We’re in September and we’ve started to get the first of the autumn releases so I actually had some choices for my new book pick this week but I’ve suddenly been seeing this everywhere and although I can’t quite work out why it sounds like a lot of fun and so I’ve picked it for this week. According to the blurb, history professor Philippa ups sticks to the seaside house she inherited from her grandmother after life gives her a wake up call in the form of a sinkhole. Her grandmother was a writer of romance novels and she’s going to be sharing the house with a reclusive writer who also turns out to have been a romance novel cover model. I’m not eve sure I need to write any more about the plot because I think you can already tell why I picked this one. I just hope it lives up to the promise of the blurb when I read it!
It’s not often that I do a non-fiction book for this post but I was really glad when this popped up on the new release lists because not only is it right up my street but I’d been struggling to find anything on the fiction lists for this week that I wanted to write about! Anyway, Hot Type is the story of the Linotype machine, which was the invention that replaced Gutenberg’s moveable type. It was at least three times faster than hand setting type for printing and led to the boom in newspaper, magazine and periodical publishing in the late 19th century. The blurb for Jeff Jarvis’s book promises the stories of the characters that were involved – from the inventors, to the media moguls, the machine operators and the journalists. My book backlog is large as you know, but I’m putting this on the acquisitions list!
It’s the first week of August which apparently means that it’s new Meg Langslow day – and this time it’s book 39 with the amazing punny title of Probably Caws. In great news for long-time fans, this one sees Meg back at some blacksmithing when she’s called in to help with a huge influx of horses at Ragnar’s estate after a horse rescue organisation lost its premises and of course murder ensues. I am currently two books behind the latest in the series because I am trying to pace myself and be sensible, but I do find Ragnar’s menage hilarious so who knows if that resolution will hold!
Happy Tuesday and my pick today is back to romance and it is one of the new releases that I read last week and there’s another coming up tomorrow in the quick reviews too.
Kalpana is planning the wedding of her dreams, or at least the wedding of her fiancé’s dreams. Marcus is a literary fiction superstar and Kalpana is a romance writer. He’s from old money and she’s the third generation of her family born in the UK but they’re in Sri Lanka with their wedding planner Sampath to plan the big traditional Sri Lankan wedding that Marcus wants – even though Kalpana isn’t sure those traditions feel right for her. Sampath is a great listener – and seems to hear what Kapana wants in a way that Marcus seems not to be.
I read it across less than twenty four hours over the weekend and it was a real treat. As you can tell from the title this is a love triangle type situation, but I don’t think this is going to ping anyone’s cheating monitor for reasons that I can’t really explain without it being a spoiler. As well as the romance, Charika is exploring feelings of identity and culture and also looking at the place of romance and commercial fiction in the bookish infrastructure all of which is right up my street. It also really made me want to visit Sri Lanka – it paints such a vivid picture of the future places they visit and the potential wedding venues.
My copy came from NetGalley but this came out last week and I’m not sure how easy the paperback will be to find but it’s on Kindle and Kobo for £1.99 at the moment as are some of Charika’s previous novels some of which I’ve written about here like Picture Perfect and Knowing Me, Knowing You.
Happy Thursday – and happy new Three Dahlias day! We have two books in the series this year and the first of them, Death on a Lively Sea sees our three heroines on a super yacht in the Med with a property mogul whose father died recently in a death that he doesn’t think was natural and who is convinced he’s going to be murdered next. And so he’s done the only thing a sensible billionaire can do: invite all the suspects on a two week cruise and get some amateur detectives along to try and work it all out. I really enjoy this series – and I love that Katy Watson is finding settings for the books that pay homage to the settings of Golden Age mysteries as well. I’m really looking forward to readng this – and to reading the seventh book which is a Christmas mystery set on a sleeper train in Swiss Alps (see above again) and is out at the end of November.
