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.
Yes I know, this is the least unexpected BotW pick since, oh I don’t know, the last time I previewed a new release book on the Thursday and then promptly had it on the read list on Monday. But in my defence, I do try not to do this and pick my previews accordingly – and indeed when I went back and checked this the last time it happened is more than a year ago with A Murder for Miss Hortense (but only because I spaced out reading Dolly All the Time, The Paris Match and Finders Keepers from their previews – mostly because those were paperback preorders and not *right there* on my Kindle tempting me). But although there were a lot of books out last week, this was the one I was most excited about given how much I loved Pineapple Street. And also one of those other books that was out last week was a second Miss Hortense book – and was trying not to repeat on that front too. Anyway, with that slightly defensive opening over, to the review:
Caroline has always wanted to be a writer and when she gets a year long writer’s fellowship, she gives up her job in publishing and moves to Greenhead, Massachusetts and the cottage that writer the fellowship is endowed for once lived in. In Greenhead she meets Van. Van is one of the locals – an outdoorsy, ecologist who is like a big friendly dog made human. Soon they’re seeing each other and and Van is including her with his group of friends – including Bailey, who he’s been falling into bed with ever since they were at school. Van’s friends aren’t overly pleased at the advent of this rival to Bailey, and this only gets worse when Bailey realises that she’s pregnant with Van’s child. She’s definitely only in their circle because Van wants her to be – and what she does when she’s not anymore throws everything in the group up in the air even more than her presence did in the first place.
The blurb doesn’t reveal what it is that Caroline does – and as it happens a long way into the book (I want to say after the 60 percent point) I’m not either because it’s a huge spoiler, but it’s totally delicious and turns what was already a really good read into something truly excellent. This is very much a rich people problems novel as well as the Greenhead group with their family summer homes and ski trips, Caroline’s mother is a hugely successful writer and there’s never any sense that Caroline’s finances are dependent on whatever she writes on the fellowship being a success and so she’s an outsider only in that she doesn’t know them, not so much in status or class. And so it’s all about relationships and drama on that front and even if people break up you know they’re going to be OK financially, even if they’re upset interpersonally.
All of which makes it exactly my sort of soapy, beach read and I absolutely devoured it, messaging various people as I went along with choice quotes and how much I was enjoying it. It would be a perfect sun lounger read – and I can see why it’s the July pick for Jenna’s book club* because it’s a summer read and I can see people having diverging views about it – and in fact if you look at the goodreads reviews you will see that! If you liked Pineapple Street (which obviously I did), I think you’ll like this. That was about Rich People Problems in Washington DC, this is about Rich People Problems on the coast. The relationships are dysfunctional – and apart from Caroline that’s because they all have so much history together – and do they even really have that much in common any more aside from that shared history? Read it and find out, if you like the same sort of books that I do (and maybe that’s why are you here?) then I don’t think you’ll regret it.
My copy came via NetGalley but I think this is going to be everywhere. Pineapple Street was, and as previously mentioned, this has been picked by one of the big US book clubs so I’m expecting this to be as everywhere as Pineapple Street, if not more so. And of course it’s also on Kindle and Kobo and in audiobook.
Happy Reading!
*Jenna is Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of George W Bush and presenter of the Today Show on which her book club is a feature.
Jenny Jackson’s first novel Pineapple Street was one of my favourite new books of 2023 and so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that her new novel is the new release that I want to highlight this week. Per the Blurb: The Shampoo Effect is about one summer in New England, where writer Caroline arrives in Greenhead and falls for its charms and for one of it’s residents, Van Whittaker. She spends the summer with his friends, including one who is pregnant with Van’s child, and it seems that the fun will keep coming – right up until it doesn’t. I love a rich people problems story – and I’ve also had a pretty good run of summer people and year round people novels which this sounds like it is too, so I have high hopes for this – and I have it on my pile ready to go too!
For the second week in a row, the new release is from an author where I’m a bit behind on their back catalogue. But with Beatriz Williams I have more of an excuse than Ashley Poston because her books can be much harder to get hold of over here. Her 2024 and 2025 releases still aren’t available on Kindle in the UK – which means I suspect that the hard copy versions I can see on Amazon are US editions and the only page for this new one on UK Amazon is a large print edition. Still The Beach at Summerley did arrive on Kindle eventually so fingers crossed for these latest three. Anyway, that’s an awful lot of talk without saying what this book is actually about, so here we go:
Lucy is a young widow, who returns to her family’s New England estate for the summer with her young daughter to mourn her father only to discover that the property is in a mountain of debt and the man who doomed her friendship with her teenage best friend is vacationing next door after an accident ended his NFL career. Because it’s Beatriz Williams there is also a historical element – this time about a fabled pirate treasure from the early eighteenth century. The location of Lucy’s family home is Winthrop Island which has also featured in other Williams novels so I really do feel like I need to read the back catalogue first, but if you’ve already done that (or you’re not as fussy as me about things like this!) then I think this sounds like an amazing summer holiday beach book.
Happy Tuesday everyone, and possibly not a surprise that I’ve picked the new Annabel Monaghan this week, but it is so fun and I enjoyed reading it so much that I couldn’t help myself.
Dolly is a problem solver. When her mum left when she was a preteen, now her family needs her and she’s 39. She’s back in her home town with her son for the summer to try and help save the family home. And that’s why, when the scion of the Whitfield family (so prominent the town is named after them) asks her to pretend to be his girlfriend after she helps him with a flat tire, she says yes. Except that the more time they spend together, the more she likes him – and the more she thinks he likes here, even though his world of galas and charity dinners is usually one she only sees when she delivers the seafood from her family store. But can Dolly bring herself to put her trust in someone else for once?
If I was doing the 50 states challenge this year, this would be the book for Rhode Island and it would not have been a hardship at all. I love a summer people and year round people clash of cultures story (it’s sort of rich people problems adjacent really isn’t it) and also a hero who can come in and make life easier for the heroine by throwing some cash around in a nice, non-skeevy way. A rich hero could be a little fraught in the current climate, but Monaghan deals with that pretty well, by making Stewart the guy who wants to pivot his family property business towards renovating historic buildings (rather than strip malls) and he’s not a billionaire so it was fine for me.
I read this in double quick time and really, really enjoyed it. It’s a satisfying romance with a great cast of characters and a lovely setting, which does some of the things I like about Pretty Woman, but without the sex work, rude sales ladies and opera! It’s not quite Nora Goes Off Script (but what is!) but I think it may be my favourite Monaghan after that.
This should also be pretty easy to get hold of – I’d preordered the paperback but it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
The new book from Ashley Poston is out this week, and as I’m trying to take it as a sign that I should catch up with her last couple of books as I have two of them on the tbr pile. I’ve loved some of her previous books – like The Seven Year Slip and The Dead Romantics so I’m not quite sure how I’ve let this happen. Anyway: The Someday Garden is about Sophie, the new head gardener at Lilymoor House in Maine and who gets more than she bargained for when she discovers a secret garden with a mysterious man trapped inside. Magic and/or time travel is a feature of Poston’s books so when I say secret garden and trapped man, I mean it’s got an entrance that never appears in the same place twice. The house itself also has an uncertain future, so I’m optimistic that this may be a “lets save the house” book as well as a romance. I have a mixed record with magic (and ghosts, and the supernatural in general) in books but Poston is usually on the side of the things that I like so I’m looking forward to reading this, even if I really shouldn’t be buying it until I’ve cleared at least one of her other books of the (virtual) tbr shelf.
After a glut of books that I had already read that came out last week, this week is one of those were there are a lot less new releases that I’m interested in. But never fear, there is (almost) always something that I would read, if only the pile wasn’t so huge. And this week my choice would be the new Eva Gates book Whose Body in the Lighthouse, which is the thirteenth in her Library Lovers and is doing something different which I find really quite interesting. For the first twelve books in the series, the lead character has been Lucy, a librarian in the Outer Banks. When I read book ten in the series three years ago, that book was covering Lucy’s wedding. Now two books on she’s had twins. I’ve written before about the difficulties of keeping a cozy series going and not progressing the characters personal lives but also the challenges presented by a heroine with young baby (or at least I think I have!) and Gates is dealing with this by… introducing a new librarian to get caught up in a murder. Or at least that’s what I think she’s doing – the start of the blurb is:
A new librarian’s first day goes terribly wrong when she finds a dead body on the front steps of the library.
In the thirteenth instalment of the beloved Lighthouse Library mysteries, a new character takes the reins.
And I’m not going to lie – I’m sort of fascinated by that. I can’t think of any cozy series I’ve read where the main character has been switched, much less successfully. If you can, please do drop them in the comments because I would love to read some. Agatha Christie moved the narrator around in her series, but the detective character was always the same – it was a Poirot mystery whether the narration was coming from Captain Hastings or Roger Ackroyd or whoever. So this has gone onto my list of things to watch out for because it’s an interesting and unusual way to tackle the problem.
It’s Tuesday again and I’m back with another BotW post – but this time it’s a new release that came out last week. It’s also the first non-fiction pick of the year – just a few weeks off the mid-way point but we can gloss over that bit.
Receipts from the Bookshop is a year in the life of Katie Clapham’s real life actual bookshop in St Annes on Sea, which is in Lancashire and near Lytham and also the (probably) better known Blackpool. It’s based on her Substack of the same name which I used to read faithfully until substack changed the way they send their emails (or I changed something in my settings on substack who can tell) and then got a bit behind. But that’s ok because now there is a book! And the fact that I didn’t remember reading much of it before suggests that that substack change happened longer ago than I thought – or that I was less faithful than I thought!
If you’re a book person – and I assume from the fact that you’re reading this that you are – then this is a wonderful insight into what it’s like to own your own bookshop and as a bonus it will also give you plenty of ideas for books to read. I concluded (and told Him Indoors this) that I could not own a bookshop because I would buy myself too many books and/or crack the spines in the stock and turn them into secondhand books before they’d even been first hand. It’s a delightful soothing read with plenty of regular characters popping in and out of the shop through the year. Personally I would like to emulate the person who has a list of their required books (new hardbacks) on a personalised piece of stationery. That’s the sort of vibes that I would like to have. I mean I don’t – because although I love hardbacks I am bad at reading them because they’re not as portable as my other options.
Anyway, this is delightful. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it on the commute and it would make a lovely gift for the bookish person in your life. And you can even buy it straight from Katie’s shop Booksellers Inc via Bookshop.org or by emailing the shop direct if you want a signed one. I have definitely ordered from her in the past – but I can’t for the life of me remember what the book was except that it may have been a Curtis Sittenfeld because I’ve pre-ordered several of those from indie at least two of which (Rodham and Romantic Comedy) were to get Indie bookseller bonus swag (a tote bag and a key ring) iirc and I think one of the swag ones was from here (the other was likely to from Fox Lane Books in Yorkshire). My copy came from NetGalley – even if I didn’t manage to post about it before release day I had actually finished it before release day for once) and it’s also available in Kindle and Kobo. And I’ll throw in another link to the Receipts from the Bookshop Substack here just in case you want to go and have a read of that before committing yourself.
June is Pride month and so its fitting that the first new release I’m featuring this month is the new book in Alexis Hall’s London Calling series – aka the third in the series that started with Boyfriend Material. It’s called Father Material and I have to say I am trepidatious. I loved Boyfriend Material and I liked Husband Material, just not as much (but still enough for it to be a BotW). I liked that Husband Material didn’t use the break-them-up-to-create-conflict trope that you see so much in sequels to romance novels – but the ending of Husband Material was not quite what a lot of readers wanted and left some people feeling like they’d fallen for a bait and switch. I did not feel like that I should say – I thought it was a perfectly consistent way to wrap up the conflict that was going on in the book. But there is definitely potential for another similar situation in this book, and that’s where my trepidation comes from – because if it does, then there’s been no character growth in anyone, at all, since the first book. And I’m not here for that. And of course it could go in a totally different direction to all of that – and I have a mixed record with some of Alexis Hall’s plots. I really liked Rosaline Palmer Takes The Cake, but I couldn’t finish the next in that series Paris Daillencourt is about to crumble and I had very strong feelings about Val deserving better than he got in Something Fabulous, to the point where I still haven’t read the sequel because I’m worried I will hate it.
All of which is to say – there is a second sequel to a beloved first book that came out this week and you should be able to find it in stores as well as on Kindle and Kobo. Best of luck everyone…
Happy first Wednesday of the month, and usually this would be where I publish my Quick Reviews for May. However, I have read a bunch of mysteries of various types that either came out yesterday, today or are coming out tomorrow and so I’m saving the quick reviews for another Wednesday and giving you a quick review round up for them. Why isn’t this just the May Quick Reviews repurposed? Well because I read one of them in April…
Played to Death by Mike Ripley*
This is quite a hard one to describe, because it’s told by four unreliable narrators, but I’m going to give it a go. A new murder mystery play is being put on by the Hopewell Players but there are some… concerns. Pantomime Dame and local solicitor Adam Cunningham consults a local librarian (and former crime fiction editor) because he thinks it’s ripping of a lot of Golden Age mysteries. The author of said play is the producer’s father but the future of the production is in doubt when one of the actors is found dead on stage. This is written by Mike Ripley, who also wrote a number of Campion continuation novels and he’s very much using his knowledge of Golden Age mysteries in this, but with a great twist with the shifting narration. I particularly enjoyed the footnotes about which books the various bits of plot had been lifted from. I read this in one day (not quite in one sitting) and immediately went off to read one of the aforementioned Campion continuations after I discovered that his other book featuring Roly the Librarian isn’t available on Kindle. The good news is that this is – and also that it’s out today and included in Kindle Unlimited.
The French Market Murder by Greg Mosse*
This is the third book in Greg Mosse’s series set around a bookshop in a small town in Provence. The first in the series was a BotW not that long ago and I’ve read book two since then as well, but I think I actually liked this the most of the three in terms of writing style and the regular characters but I found the solution to the mystery pretty predictable – I figured out most of it pretty quickly after the body was found, which actually happened quite late on for a murder mystery. But I do really like the setting and set up for this and would happily read more, and every time I read one I think that I should go and read his other series which features a much younger Zoe as a side character to the main sleuth, although without reading them it’s hard to tell how prominent she is but they get plenty of references in these! I really do fancy a holiday to Provence now though…
A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Catching a Killer by F H Petford*
This is the follow up to 2025’s A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Solving a Murder which was also a BotW. We rejoin Alma at the gang at the Timperley shortly after the conclusion of that book – and as a warning, if you haven’t read the first book you will find out who did it if you read this one so plan your reading accordingly – and things seem to be going well. Well that is until a guest is found dead in their bed. With the police short-staffed because of officers signing up to fight, Alma is asked to help with the investigation and she’s very willing as the circumstances suggest that the killer may be inside the hotel. The mystery in this is good, and I liked the widening of the group around Alma as well. I’m not really into spiritualism or ghosts, but these are at the end of the ghostly spectrum that I can get on board with. I read this very quickly (across about 36 hours) and I’m so pleased that there’s already a third book planned that I have it pre-ordered already. If you haven’t read book one – and bearing in mind my warnings above you should before you read this – that one is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment if you have that.
Sconed to Death by Betty Hechtman*
This is the second book featuring a heroine who inherited a yarn shop in a small Indiana town and (temporarily) moved there from LA. Annie’s father is a high powered entertainment agent, and in tow with her is Gray, the daughter of one of her father’s most important clients and now her business partner as Annie tries to get the yarn shop ready for sale. In this book the summer residents have descended on town and Annie has a lot of balls in the air, including trying to help Toby who bakes the scones for the yarn shop’s tea room get on a reality show in the hopes that it means that any buyer for the store will keep him on as a supplier. I realise that that sounds complex, and that’s not even the murder side of the plot! There is a murder (don’t worry) which could also be an obstacle to the sale of the tearoom and so Annie is soon low key investigating that. And also navigating a potential relationship and managing Gray’s fractious relationship with her mum. When you write that plot down it’s quite a lot, even with just the bare bones that I’ve given you, but it actually (mostly) works when you’re reading it. The set up of Annie’s presence in town is pretty neat and Gray’s pampered princess life makes for some good tension in the plot and some reasons why Annie wouldn’t just be having actual conversations at various points. The writing style was a little repetitive at times -for example it was reminding me of details that it had told me just a couple of pages prior, but I do wonder how I would have felt if I had read the first book and already knew all the backstory to everything because I definitely don’t think there is anything I was missing about the first book (except for who did the murder so that’s good at least). I haven’t read anything by Betty Hechtman before, but she’s a pretty established author so I suspect this is just her style and it might just not quite be for me, but I enjoyed this enough that I would happily read some more books by her to find that out!
And there you have it – four reviews of four books out this week. I promise that the quick reviews will turn up on a future Wednesday as will the Kindle Offers.
